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If you're working a desk job, you can likely remember the feeling of having arrived that came from receiving your first set of business cards. There's your name and title on a piece of card stock. Here's a tangible sign that you matter in a form that can be slipped into the hand of anyone you meet and/or greet. It’s a shame that business cards aren’t what they used to be. In fact, business cards are a relic of a bygone era of corporate schmoozing and have no place in your current networking efforts. Here's why:
We're living in a high-speed gig economy
Business cards don’t reflect the increasingly transient nature of employment and the iterative nature of our career identities. Tenure at a given job is decreasing, especially for Millennials, who have already earned a rep as notorious job hoppers. The card someone hands you today could lead to a disconnected phone line or a dead email address tomorrow. Have business cards from startups in your rolodex that are more than six months old? If that company is still in business (and that’s a big if), it’s likely pivoted three times and changed its name at least twice.
Our relationship to employment has also become more tenuous with the growth of contract, freelance and permalance working arrangements and the necessity of knitting together multiple gigs in order to make ends meet. If you pay your bills by renting out your apartment two weeks a month on AirBnB, drive for Uber and do odd jobs via TaskRabbit, what sort of job title do you give yourself and how do you represent your gig dependent life on a business card? What about if you’re a long-term contract employee for an established company? You don’t have a physical office or benefits, but you do get a steady pay check. When it comes to your ambiguous business card status, it’s like having all the responsibilities of couplehood, but dating someone who steadfastly refuses to publicly acknowledge you as her boyfriend.
Business cards provide static engagement
What exactly does a business card tell you about the person who handed it to you? Their name, job title, phone numbers and email address is about it. The card can’t tell you about their creativity or problem-solving abilities, their thoughts on challenges facing their industry or just how big of a Doctor Who fan they are. With the internet at our fingertips, business cards are downright quaint in their lack of detail and dimensionality. If we want to know about someone these days, we can Google them and sift through their tumblr, browse their Twitter or read about the Chamber of Commerce award they received in the digital edition of their local paper to get a sense of what makes them tick. There are even apps that will curate all of this info for you.
Want to stay in contact with someone you meet in the course of your job? Skip the business card and connect with them on LinkedIn instead. Whatever your feelings on the platform, it provides a much greater depth and breadth of current professional info than can fit on card stock. And if you’re only interested in someone for access to their connections (a large part of what networking is about, even if we won’t admit it), LinkedIn even allows you to do a ruthless end run around the cardholder and get more direct access to their industry contacts.
You're probably using them wrong
I have a professional colleague whose CEO used to evaluate the success of his team's participation in conferences and trade shows based on how many business cards they collected and distributed. Team members were required to submit spreadsheets upon their return listing all of the cards they had received. He with the biggest stack won. Needless to say, this approach didn't exactly promote meaningful engagement with qualified prospects or potential suppliers.
Too many people use business cards as a proxy for actually being an interesting person. I know I'm not the only one who has been to conferences and watched attendees rush the stage after a panel to spam the presenters with their business cards, without preamble and without taking a moment to connect with the person into whose hand they were pressing them. The last time I saw this happen was at a marketing conference where everyone involved should rightly have known better. I’ve also been to sit down networking events where early arrivers carefully circle the table to lay one of their cards at each place setting as if they were positioning salad forks.
Just like you wouldn’t ask someone at a club for their number before you even got their name, business cards should never be the opening salvo in your interaction with another individual . Your conversation should do the heavy lifting and the piece of paper you pass over at the end of it should be nothing more than a convenient reminder of your contact info so that you and the other person can continue to engage in the future.
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