Yes, in some circles it's weird to use them, but in my experience those circles are the weird thing. Those circles are usually software folks and startup folks in places like the SF bay area, etc. In those situations everyone trades linkedin profiles or adds eachother to contacts as we are standing meeting eachother. That leads to very weird social interactions which are the norm in these circles but are definitely not normal social behavior in the broader world.
In the broader world, everyone has a card. It would be weird if you were giving a police report and the deputy told you his linkedin profile address, or whatever. Same for your plumber, business card make sense and a aren't going away.
Last night after leaving a local tech event in Austin I stumbled into an ‘AI Industry’ reception which turned out to be all high powered government officials and lobbyists. I had my Popl NFC/QR code business card but they all had old school business cards. So it’s not just plumbers but also big tech lobbyists and former secretary of states who live and breath paper business cards.
But, whether in a personal or a business context, I don't do... either of these things?
Mostly, if I'm meeting someone for the first time in person, then it's either through friends, or at an event.
If it's through friends, I just... meet them. No "connect." We have a conversation. We say goodbye. If I want to reach out to them later, I ask the friend I met them through to reach out for me. Simple and 100% effective.
If it's at an event, I might ask for, say, their Twitter handle. (Or, if they're an artist, their Instagram handle; or if they're a maker, their Etsy store; etc.) But I won't interrupt the conversation to write it down, let alone add them right then and there. I'll just remember the handle, and if I really care, I'll write it down after the end of the conversation. Or, if I care slightly less, I'll forget it (or not bother to ask for it) and then if I decide I care later, I'll google their name + the name of the city we were in (or the city they're from) + their occupation and/or company they said they worked for.
...and outside of those two contexts, then I'm likely not meeting the person for the first time in person, so I don't want/need a card.
My plumber? They're already in my house. I presumably called them. I know who they are. I found them online, probably. "Their card" is their website/Facebook page/etc.
A deputy at a police station? I don't even need to know their name. They're a public servant with a uniquely role in their department. I'm guaranteed to be able to look them up at any time by role on the police department's website, and/or call the police department's non-emergency number and ask for them by role.
The first situation doesn't apply, I don't generally give my business card out in personL situations either, and let relationships organically happen as they do. That's not this.
Thanks for the second example, it gets right to my point.
Yes, in San Francisco if you ask the average professional for their Twitter handle that may be a way to contact them, etc. In much of the broader world its weird to assume people have one (I don't). It's weird to assume that that would be the way to contact them. Most of the world still uses email, phone and whatsapp/etc replacements for such to communicate. If I'm meeting someone for business purposes I want to know their business name, address, phone number and email. I don't want to know their recent tweets, etc. I just want to know what number to call when I want that service.
> I just want to know what number to call when I want that service.
I have literally never once in my life been in the situation of wanting to hire someone to provide me a service after the first time I met that person, in person.
Heck, I have literally never once in my life ended up with the knowledge that someone provides a defined service I would want, after a first in-person conversation with them.
Because people who aren't weird entrepreneurs/founders/"personal brand" marketers, don't market themselves in the sort of small talk they make on a first meeting. And likewise, when I'm talking to someone who doesn't read as a weird entrepreneur/founder/"personal brand" marketer, I don't ask them what they do as a first-step way of getting to know them. Because for most people, that's not the thing they want to talk about upon first meeting someone! It's not the most exciting and novel and conversationally-fascinating thing about them! It's just some boring shit and they want to get away from it when they're not at work! (Or, worse yet, it's something they're embarrassed to admit — like that they're currently unemployed — and you're throwing a wet blanket on the conversation by steering it toward work!)
I have been in the situation of being e.g. over at a friend's place, and the friend has a tradesperson or housekeeper or babysitter or something drop in. But you know who I ask for the service provider's contact info? Not the service provider. The friend!
In fact, I would go even further. I lived much of my life in a small farming community; I only moved to a big tech-hub city as an adult. If someone in my small farming community who I didn't know came up to me and started trying to sell me their services... I would actively distrust them as a service provider! I wouldn't just not call them; I'd do my own research, and if I saw that person among the results, I'd be biased toward skipping over them as an option. I would feel spite toward them for having acted upon a belief that they could force themselves into a top-of-mind position in my mental rankings for their service, without me even expressing interest. I'd feel about them the same way I feel about businesses that take out interstate billboard ads, or maybe people who try to force flyers into the hands of passers-by.
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But that's getting a bit beyond the point, because more people are "weird" entrepreneurs/founders/"personal brand" marketers these days than you'd think. It's not just an SF thing, or even a big-city thing. No matter where you go in the world, I promise you that all the stalls at the farmer's markets will have some kind of social-media handle on their banners. Your plumber almost assuredly does have a Facebook Page (whether they personally made it or asked someone to make it for them.) Your local campground — literally just a big flat patch of grass — almost assuredly has explicitly submitted (paid!) listings to 4-5 different camping directories. My local thrift shop runs For Sale By Dealer ads on Craigslist. Heck, my 45-year-old second cousin, who has lived her whole life in one of the poorest parts of the Philippines with spotty electricity and no running water, has a sari-sari store — and the sari-sari store has a Facebook Page. The gig economy is real.
All business owners have to market themselves in some way; and if they haven't lived in a cave for the last 30 years, they'll know that some potential clients will only do their research online — so they'll ensure they can be found online, somehow or another.
So it's really just employees that need business cards. In theory.
But even then: why do you need to reach out to an employee, anyway? You can just reach out to the business they work for.
(The one single exception I can think of, is if you interact with / pay the business, but all the "employees" are still gig workers or contractors, and the employees' services are not interchangeable. Like, say, hairstylists who rent chairs at a salon, and might be gone from that salon the next time you visit. I could imagine getting a stylist's business card. ...but, weirdly enough, they don't tend to use them! They — like most "artist" types — tend to point you to their portfolio website / Instagram page!)
I agree with you. Many of the situations you describe here would be weird situations to just bust out a business card in. I'm not advocating for walking up to random people selling your services and giving out cards, agreed.
What I am saying:
In situations where it makes sense, like trade shows, conferences, introduction meetings, business mixers or meet snd greets, situations where we are expected and encouraged as attendees to "do business" it can be very convenient to have a small piece of paper with your professional info on it so everyone doesn't have to carry notebooks or bust out our phone all the time.
It is also very convenient in situations where I have performed a service for a client and I can give them a card and say keep this, if you have any problems reach out, or I can put a card in with the hardware I ship them.
> trade shows, conferences, introduction meetings, business mixers or meet snd greets
Alright, sure. I will admit that this is the "obvious"-at-first-glance use for business cards. I thought this way myself, until the rubber hit the road.
I'm a weird entrepreneur/founder person. And I do attend industry conferences myself. And the first time I went to one, I did get business cards printed, expecting to need to use them.
At that first conference, when it was just me and my cofounder, no employees yet — my company didn't bother to get a booth at that conference. Instead, since we were in a B2B positioning, and the people with the booths at the conference were our potential customers, we just walked around talking to them, trying to hook them as customers in between their (non-applicable) attempts to hook us as customers.
But you know what? Despite the high levels of engagement and "huh, that's a great idea, I bet we could use that" — there was zero measurable impact from the "handshake outreach marketing" we did at that conference. Nobody ever funneled in having mentioned meeting us at that conference (despite us handing out at least 500 cards between the two of us); nor did anyone sign up mentioning that one of their employees told them about us due to them hearing about us from the conference.
Why? If I had to guess, it's because the people we were talking to at these trade shows fell into one of two buckets:
• early-stage businesses / one-man shops like us — where we were talking directly to the founders at the booth, but where the founders weren't yet at the stage where they had money to spend on services like ours, instead having to do everything that they could themselves to scrape by.
• salespeople sent to these conferences by larger companies: people who had selling dealflow authority within their company; but who had no buying dealflow authority — or even buying proposal authority — within their companies. (And I do understand that; I've found over the years that our own salespeople have been sometimes a bit too easily swayed by good rhetoric, "crying wolf" with breathless excitement over potential partnerships that are on flimsy ground business/product/engineering-wise. Salespeople are people with an ear for a good pitch — which is what lets them create a good pitch themselves; but it also means that a pitch with good structure can excite them, even without something meaningful behind it. Like an artist being excited by post-modern art with no underlying message.)
Which together add up to the conclusion that, at least for us... trade-shows just weren't a good fit for selling our product. After a few more attempts, we just stopped bothering.
(We do market at trade-shows now that we have the money for it. Booths, sure, but more importantly, ads in nearby airports during the days of the conference, sponsoring talks or conference-room names, etc. That's all just to build brand recognition, not for brand value education. And that does have a measurable impact. It turns out that the people we want to reach aren't manning the booths; they're the ones who drop into the city on the day of the conference with an eye toward making big handshake deals with specific vendors. And you can only reach them passively/ambiently.)
> It is also very convenient in situations where I have performed a service for a client and I can give them a card and say keep this, if you have any problems reach out, or I can put a card in with the hardware I ship them.
I guess that's fair... but I would say that you're actually limiting yourself by using a business card in that situation.
Business cards are the way they are because — at the time of their inception — you might be meeting someone on the street where the two of you won't have any other way to carry small pieces of paper than slipping them into your wallets; so a stiff card, made of relatively-cheap card-stock, that fits well into a wallet, is an ideal form-factor.
But if you're already providing the customer a service, and want to get repeat business, and/or want to cross-sell them on your other services? Think bigger. Think brand-value education. Think brochures. (In fact, for a concrete example, think about a restaurant: until very recently, most restaurants that did a lot of phone-in orders would drop a paper menu in with every order. That's effectively a brochure; they're doing an exhaustive cross-selling on all their other offerings!)
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One final piece of evidence that supports neither side of the argument: artists/makers at craft fairs.
These are people who normally only get to do one transaction with you, and don't have time to build any brand recognition — you're probably looking at the product, not at the ad copy. They don't expect you to write down their handle, even if you buy something from them. And for a lot of product categories (e.g. soap, handbags, ceramic figures, etc) there's no good place on the product itself to place any marketing info.
The smart artists/makers at these fairs, will slip a business card (or something very much like one — I reiterate that the business-card form factor isn't necessary here) into anything you purchase from them.
The funny thing, though, is that the only thing these artist/maker business cards have on them, are the artist's/makers's social-media handles (i.e. the same ones that are printed on the banner of the booth.)
As such, interestingly enough, the artists/makers will often turn their "business card" into a good of its own — something people would want to display for its own sake — but which is given out for free with purchase of any other item. E.g. someone at an art fair who makes vinyl stickers, will make a vinyl sticker of a stylized version of their brand logo / brand mascot, with the social-media handle snuck in somewhere on it, and that will be their "card." Some people see these on the table and try to buy them!
> I’ve have literally never once in my life ever written a comment as long as yours
I get this sort of reply almost every time I write a "divisive" comment.
I write a lot, I admit; but it doesn't take me particularly long to do so, and would take me a lot longer if I tried to edit it down.
Maybe all the words aren't necessary, but IMHO all the points I made were: anything I left out would be brought up as an easy rebuttal, and I don't want to spend hours going back and forth on "gotchas" that I could just head off at the pass.
People don't get mad at this communication style when I use it in a non-debate (e.g. "fun thing I learned") context. Why does it suddenly rile people up so much when it's used for debate?
(Is it because people generally expect textual debate to work like verbal debate — where rhetorical "interrupts" about a person not being immediately perfectly clear and precise the first time they make a point, are considered "invalidations" of that argument, even if the person wasn't done making the point? And once people are allowed to have an arbitrarily-long "turn", they can fully clarify their initially-messy points, so the people who ride on rhetorical "interrupts" have no ammunition left other than "that was too long"?)
I think the reason you repeat encounter the same reaction is because the length of a response is usually indicative of the persons underlying emotions/intent/excitement/etc
As an analogy, WRITING IN ALL CAPS, imparts yelling to the reader. Likewise, length imparts on to the reader as well. Long length can feel intense and over-zealous when it’s unnecessary, just as short lengths can feel glib.
Anyways, just a data point amongst many - hope it’s beneficial
fwiw I'm an entrepreneur/business owner far from the software business, and I've be asked a few times for a business card so I'm going to get one just to have it handy.
For conferences and trade-shows where there is an expectation to network. My company gives us conventional cards with little qr code v-cards.
I only needed a handful of cards for a recent event as I'm not one of the sales engineers. When I realized I wouldn't have any in time if I requested them, I saw it as an opportunity to understand the v-card format and qr codes and write https://github.com/Stedag/qr_card which generated them and I just cut a out a couple sheets of card stock.
My favorite part is that I could set the note for my contact in their phone to be specific to the event while not being sneaky:
Sure. I would go so far as to say if you consider yourself a professional in your field and don't have a business card, you are probably missing out on networking opportunities. (Not because you don't have a business card, but because you aren't exposing yourself to situations where people would ask for one.)
Yes. Go to any conference or trade show or people-convergent event, nearly just about anywhere, particularly one that is even just vaguely not "tech" since, like, Bay Area bubblism seems to be the exception, and you'll find cards being traded like...trade show business cards.
Not necessarily but here is how I do (I'm in the technical industry).
I will try to initiate the iOS Bump thingy > if not goes to a backup tool called HiHello[1] (universal) > then the business card. Of course, if I'm in the company of either Japanese or if I see people handing out printed business cards, I have my super well-done minimal but still beautiful paper business card. The paper ones lasts a very long time (years) these days.
1. I stumbled on HiHello (I think on HackerNews) and I can use this by just swiping the home screen for the widget and don't have to ever open the App. https://www.hihello.com
Honestly, if you’re in a job where you meet potential connections in person, it’s a lot easier to give someone a card with your info rather than to tell them how to find you on the internet and hope they remember.
I was at gophercon last month, and I vowed to get calling cards before next year. Getting out your phone and typing contact info is awkward by itself. Add in my hearing loss and it gets even worse.
After accruing a big bag of them which I honestly never looked at again, I stopped. Accepting one from someone is considered polite in some circles, but ultimately meaningless
