Business Card Best Practices from Robert Scoble
Earlier this month, former Microsoft head blogger, Robert Scoble, offered a set of Business Card Best Practices on his blog.
In transitioning jobs Robert went through his more than 1,000 business cards and came away with some tips on what to include (and not include) on your business cards to make them stand out and serve their purpose. These are definitely worth a read.
He gives us 11 best practices, of which my favorite is “A good business card starts a conversation”
Interestingly, Robert discusses different versions of his own business cards, including his most recent card from his role at Microsoft which included his name in Braille. He writes that he actually only gave his card to one blind person, but that the Braille on his card served a different purpose all together - - it was a conversation starter.
Robert’s post also mentions a version of his business card that featured a cartoon from “business card cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod. Hugh penned the cartoons here for Scoble.
Any of Hugh’s business card cartoons featured on his site, gapingvoid, are available for free download. If you are a big fan of MacLeod’s you can also snag his art widget for your own blog here.
In the PR business I think there is a special level of expectation; that given we are professional communicators our business cards should communicate above and beyond the average business card. I think this is fair. After all, why would a company hire us to help them communicate if we don’t do a good job with our own image?
In addition, networking is such an important part of PR. On the agency side, that business card you give to a company executive might not be looked at for months; but when that executive is in the hunt for a new PR agency you can only hope that your business card made the cut, is still in the executive’s collection, and that you made a strong enough initial impression to earn a call back.
Several years ago I attended the CTIA conference in Las Vegas while supporting HP’s PR efforts around its Mobile Bazaar program. We had a ton of meetings with media and analysts at the show, and as I was preparing for the trip one of the things that stood out to me was the disadvantage that an agency contact has at a big busy tradeshow like CTIA in that they are not a direct employee of the company they are there promoting. For example, I was working with The Hoffman Agency at the time, but was supporting Hewlett-Packard. As I was meeting reporters and analysts (sometimes for our first face-to-face encounter) I wanted to make sure that I impressed upon them that they could call me in the future for PR-related questions around HP.
It was far too late to order new custom business cards just for the conference, so instead, I created stickers that were the size of my business card which I then carefully placed on the backside of the card. The stickers said “The Hoffman Agency For Hewlett-Packard” along with a short bulleted list of the areas of HP that I could assist the media with. The stickers also included my cell phone number as the best way to reach me during the show, along with the Web address of the online press kit for our news that week.
I received a lot of feedback from journalists that the information was really helpful. In fact several commented on the number of agency cards they have for which they have no idea what clients the agency represents. I’m sure I’m not the first to go to these kind of efforts for a tradeshow; and in fact I’ll wager that many agencies probably have been printing client-specific business cards for years. However, based on the feedback from the media it seems to me that we all could be doing a better job with this.
MobilityPR will give this idea a run while we are at the CTIA IT & Entertainment conference in LA this September.
What do you think?
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