Business card or website?

The printed business card still has many years to live. Despite widespread use of digital contents everywhere, in all fields, despite the generalised do-not-print advice you see everywhere, at the bottom of e-mail messages more particularly, the little die-hard card bravely takes up the digital challenge and proves that there is still a place for traditional means of communication. In a world where everything pushes you to work with soft copies and websites, the hard copy business card is an exceptional survivor.

The fact is plain to see. Understanding why is another story.

When building a simple website to introduce yourself to the others is simple, easy and inexpensive, when sending personal or business contact info from smartphone to smartphone is wireless and virtually instant, what good is a business card for then? Especially that in most cases the first thing you do with a business card that has just been given to you is to rush and enter the info in a digital database, only to get rid of the card after that, or file it somewhere where it will be archived forever and never taken out again!

In many instances you would scan the card and have it optically read by the scanner with data automatically fed into the digital database. There are even free apps for smartphones that do the trick. CamCard and ScanBizCards are two apps for Android that work very well, using the phone’s camera as a scanner to take a picture of the card, and then read it (i.e. convert it to digital) and feed the info into a database.

The world is desperately trying to be kind to the environment, and the COP21 global conference this week in Paris, France, comes as a strong reminder of the trend, of the movement. Isn’t a printed business card kind of a sin in a way, a blatant contradiction?

Fashions come and go. A few years ago you were invited to give up on business cards and instead to have the same information saved on a tiny giveaway CD drive, the size and the shape of a business card, and that was supposed to replace the latter. Of course some found it trendy, fun, but it was nothing but a fad and people quickly realised that it was nonsense. It was complicated, expensive and downright ridiculous.

Having a one-page simple website with your personal information is hardly more expensive than a pack of 500 business cards, which is the average quantity that a person consumes per year. Moreover there are countless tools available off the web today that can design the site for you and have it up and running in a couple of hours — no technical knowledge required at all. Wordpress is such a service.

However, a printed card needs no Internet to be read, is immediate and constitutes a physical reminder. Even if you invite people to take a look at your website to get to know you, they may forget or be reluctant to do so, and besides, they have to memorise your website address anyway or write it down on some piece of paper or on … a business card! A real printed card is the best reminder; you’ll find it there once you empty your pockets in the evening or when you go back to your office.

I recently spoke to the owner of a printing press in Amman and he told me that he has not seen any significant decline in his clients’ request for business cards printing over the last few years. People still like to give a card, complementing it by indicating their website address on it, for those who would like to go there to find more information.

Logic and common sense say that traditional business cards should be on their way out, but social and business habits do not always follow logic. Perhaps it is about this instinctive need for a physical contact with objects that matters so much to us human beings and that the digital world is depriving us from. The good old card will take some more time before it bows out.