The Effective CIO

Got A Card? November 6, 2009

At any industry event, the impact of social media is evident.  People are tweeting as the event transpires. Bloggers c0ver keynote addresses live.  Vendors stream video from their booths, letting you watch presentations as you browse the show floor.

It is now common to see people run into folks they know but have never actually met.  Relationships built on Twitter or Facebook come alive when people actually meet face to face.  Closing the loop with a physical connection is now the last component of a rich relationship; it used to be the first.

In spite of all this connectedness and mobile technology, one thing has remained absolutely unchanged throughout the lifetime of the internet: the business card.  How can it be, with all this technology at our disposal, that the single most important way to gather important data about a person is a little card? Even people who have built a strong relationship electronically will still exchange cards when they meet for the first time.

Why?  What is missing from the new media that this old solution provides?

The problem has two sources.  First, people still need to exchange some basic data to complete a connection: name, phone number, email address.  Physical address is becoming much less important; other items (like your Twitter or Facebook name) are becoming more prominent.  Even so, the basic way to reach most people is by phone or email.

Secondly, there is no simple way to exchange this information.  I have used many electronic devices over the years, from a Casio Zoomer to various Palm devices to all sorts of phones.  Each of this gadgets has had some way to create a business card and send it to someone else, either by infrared or Bluetooth.  It was always very cool, seemed to work like magic, and never got used more than once or twice.  After you had shown off your geek skills to admiring neighbors, you then exchanged business cards and went on your way.

I don’t know that this will ever change.  There is no cross-platform standard for exchanging virtual business cards that actually works.  I know all about Bluetooth Object Exchange, but it’s just too hard to set up and actually use in real life.

Even if you could establish such a standard, it would take years for everyone to acquire a device that used it.  In the meantime, you’d still be handing out business cards.  And you’d still need cards for people without a device, not to mention needing cards to throw into drawings and such at industry events.

It’s actually kind of quaint that such an old practice simply will not succumb to modern technology.  Even as more and more people  tweet and blog and post and stream, you still cannot avoid asking that age-old question: “May I have your card?”

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