Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Precious Real World Connections

“The more connected to the web we are, the more precious the real world is, so it is important to make a connection,” says Richard Morass.

I think we are hungry for connection on multiple levels. I think we want to find ways to interact with our fellow human beings beyond "your kid plays soccer with my kid" and "we work down the hall from each other." The real world is more precious, it seems. If only making real connection was as easy as exchanging cards.

The Morass quote was in a Fast Company article at http://bit.ly/zsBfeT. It's basically a commercial for MOO.com, which he founded, but I do appreciate some of his sentiments. And I think what he says above is really true. Even at the techiest of events, I find people have and exchange business cards.

MOO cards don't fascinate me the way they do others - mainly because they are not standard size. While that's all well and good for some people, many people still rely on traditional products to maintain and organize their business cards and I'm not ready to jump off that bandwagon quite yet.

That said, I've wanted to order them since I first heard about them years ago - maybe 2005 or so? They were big in artists circles before I saw them popping up anywhere else. They're really nice quality pieces, but I just don't know what I'd do with them. If I'm at an event where I'm handing out cards I will use the ones I already have.

Business card design is something I think about regularly because every time I do one, it's different. I've had my current one for maybe a couple of years. I put a QR code on the back of it as a social experiment and it was curious that for quite a few months only the techiest of people knew what that was, much less what to do with it. Now that they're on ketchup bottles in restaurants they've obviously reached the mainstream. However, the ways I had hoped that technology would go have not developed, so I'm not sure I'll use one again - have to think about that a bit.

I preach consistency in marketing all the time, but it's so difficult to apply all those rules to oneself. But, I must, I must, I must.
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