So you’re leaving your house in the morning and you check you have everything you need; you have your iPhone, your purse or wallet, your car keys, your laptop, but do you bother to grab a handful of business cards? Do you keep a batch close at hand in your wallet or laptop case? And do business cards even fit in a modern world where everything is on line?

Different people use business cards for different things. Some use them as they were originally intended – as a form of reference for a contact with just the company name, your name, address, email and phone on it. Others use business cards as a mini advertisement, with either a strap line saying what you do, or a mini CV on the back of the card with your skills and experience.

Recently, I started wondering, should I add more to my fairly standard business card, and be handing them out a lot more.

I was thinking about either a statement of what it is I do (such as “consultant and freelance software developer within the xxxx sector”), and/or a LinkedIn URL. That way, if I do end up handing out lots of cards at a business event, at least people know what it was I did, rather than trying to remember. And the advantage of a LinkedIn reference is a good idea as you can keep that up-to-date or, if you are a techy type a simple “@myname” to get your twitter address in their hands might be enough.

Of course, the flip side of this option is that the cards would be very busy (you could put the extra information on the back, but who really turns the cards over, and the printing costs are a lot more), and you may need to print 2 or more sets – one for each type of work that you do.

There was an interesting item in the London evening Standard a few weeks ago.  In a nutshell…

• Business Card still work (although the average use is 4 reads then binned)
• High impact personal cards make an impact
• Do something original

The other direction you can go with Business cards is to create amusing original cards.  More ideas of the use of business cards can also be found here.

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