The Business of Biz Cards

Hi friends!

Today’s post is a totally random topic. I’m about to start rambling about a seemingly miniscule subject, but it’s something that keeps crossing my mind this week while in Vegas at a tech convention for my work, so I’m going with it…

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Business cards. 

Everyone knows what they are. Their purpose is a simple concept – to provide someone with your contact information so that he/she can get in touch with you sometime in the future if they’d like.

But has anyone else ever thought about how ridiculously overused they are?

When I go to trade shows, I come home with quite a pile of biz cards. And let’s face it, the chances of me going through all of those cards to find someone’s info is slim.

I’m not saying they’re pointless, as they definitely serve a purpose when appropriate. What I am saying is that people have a tendency to overdo things, no matter how big or small they may be, and business card usage is no exception.

As a public relations professional, I only have direct contact with certain employees that work for my company’s clients. At these shows, I often meet other employees who I don’t work with. A lot of the time these people give me their business cards. Do I need them? Honestly, no. If I did, I’d already have it, or could easily get your info…because I already work with your company.

Also as a PR pro, I arrange interviews between the press and our clients. Often, when I meet up with these press people, they immediately hand me their business cards. What’s the purpose of giving out a biz card? So that someone can easily access your info. But to have set up these interviews to begin with, I had to contact these people somehow. This means that I already have their email addresses and phone numbers. Riiigght. So tell me again why I’m constantly handed business cards in this kind of situation? Unless you have a joke or awesome quote printed on your biz card, it’s not showing me anything new.

Or perhaps the perpetual need to give out biz cards is rooted in egotism, as in, ooh look at my impressive job title! Blah.

I have a feeling it’s not just limited to my industry either.

Now that I think about it, I’ve gotten contact cards from stay-at-home mom military wives. When this happens I think, WHAT? Haven’t you heard of plugging a phone number or email address into your iPhone? How many people do you meet that you feel the need to be formal enough to give a biz card to Mrs. Fancy Pants? Hmm, maybe I’m just too casual.. BUT this does add an extra step in the process of getting in touch with somebody. Instead of me immediately putting the number in my phone, I now would have to reference the business card, which would entail me first finding the business card, which would start off as me browsing around my messy purse to cleaning out my messy purse, getting distracted, and forgetting why I started looking in that black hole of a bag to begin with… but I digress.

In my opinion, we should only hand out our business cards when we actually think there’s a shot that the person we’re talking to might want to contact us later on, and to go even further, that we’d have an interest in responding.

Sure, maybe one day I’ll think, Oh yeah, remember that guy I met that one time that works for that business that I’d like to talk with? Didn’t I take his card? 

But you know what? I can almost guarantee that I won’t be able to find his card and will wind up trying to Google it anyhow. Because the vast majority of the time, Googling will take a hell of a lot less time than searching through a boatload of business cards. Come to think of it, this has definitely already happened on multiple occasions.

So the moral of the story is, we should stop being business card crazed and start using them only when necessary.

Because besides causing me to fall into deep thought about the simple idea of business cards and overanalyzing them to symbolize the human propensity to be excessive in general, we’re wasting a lot of paper here people.

…and that’s my rant for the night!