The unemployment rate is still soaring, consumer expense is still not showing big sign of recovery.  The terrorist has ran out of idea as they keep trying to blow up planes.  What else can go wrong these days?  Rather than living in a pessimistic world, why don’t people talk about the positives during this so called worst of the century period (I personally don’t think it is that difficult a time we are in as we are not fighting for foods as people were in the war times).

I am not sure your useless business card from past employers is part of the severance package when you got layoff.  But most of the time, they let you take them with you as a memorable gift/trash.  Let’s do something fun with business cards.  Imagine if we gather all the business cards from the unemployment and stack them all up or create some kind of art, what will that going to look like!?

A few ideas on utilizing old business cards, http://tinyurl.com/l3aoza

I am sure if you’re a owner of a florist shop, you should have printed some amount of business cards for your customers. If you’re going GREEN, think about less paper (trees) and less ink (oil). How about the cost of printing…for long term. Yes, I can print 10k copies of business cards…How about 1 Million copies? I bet this is not a good move. Think about the beauty of internet, we are accessing things faster and smarter. Imagine if you have added your business card into CardDemand network, people around the world will able to see your business card and contact you right away. You can reach a lot more customers today, trust us.

A business card is a representation of an entity. You are telling people who you are and what are you doing. A typical yellow page website or even google/yahoo search will tell you only information in text or may be just a logo. Nowadays, all the business cards are well designed and it is a true brand recognition presentation (it is a perfect advertising tool). That is why we all need a business card. Next time, I will blog about why we need business card online.

Anything you can imagine nowadays are being tested in the lab down to the homogeneous level to let us know what a risky life we are living in.  Food is a really good example.  It doesn’t surprise us anymore we either find toxic chemicals or bacteria in many kind of processed foods, even in fresh produces.  Why do we need to know so much about what is inside the food we consume everyday?  Does more education mean we can live longer?  I see all these kind of efforts we are putting into lab testing and researching are somewhat for generating more business opportunity.  Are we really trying to make a better world or open up another can of worm here?

Although we can stay away from unhealthy foods, personal cleanliness is also a big issue to keep us away from illness.  It is easy to understand that frequent personal interactions or staying in public area has a higher chance to be infected by contagious diseases (still remember the time your kids were sick almost every other two weeks when they started preschool!?).  However, it is not so obvious that our personal belongings could be a bacteria carrier as well.

Dollar bills and coins are perfect examples.  Needless to say that money is the most powerful thing in the world. On the other hand, it is one of the most dirtiest thing in the world.  Does bacteria live on paper bills or coins?  Here is an interesting article http://tinyurl.com/naj5xd dated many years back.  Business cards could also be a high risk item in terms of carrying bacteria.  In reality, it is not possible to live in a bacteria-free environment on the planet earth.  Having electronic business card and use electronic payment system like Paypal can reduce the interactions with potential bacteria carriers.  It is important to recognize that we can’t live entirely in the electronic world.  It is the matter of balancing our lifestyles which helps prolong our lives rather than worrying too much about everything.  Try to come up your own 5 ways to stay away from worrying too much.  Try start using our online business card features or here are more suggestions http://tinyurl.com/lq8gjv

How many of us keep track of and organize the business cards we received in our daily lives?  If so, can we identify a few reasons why we hold on to the business cards for a definite period of time?  Asking the same question to the people who hand out their business cards.  What is the most important thing you want to have on your business card so that people receive it will hold on to it a bit longer?  A business card is constrained in size and because of the space limitation, you want to explicitly present yourself and making sure your prospects are getting your message.   People often put something irrelevant (e.g. calendar) on their business card and hope that the recipient will keep their business card longer for other purposes.  Let’s look at this in a different perspective, people tend to hold on to electronic files or information longer than a hardcopy of the document as they don’t occupy any physical space(isn’t fighting with more living space is what we are dealing with everyday in our lives!).  Keeping hard copies of business card can be a hobby to someone but for most of us, it is more preferable to obtain a softcopy of the business card.  This will be a win-win situation as business people can allocate more space for useful information on their business cards rather than putting something irrelevant.  And the recipient certainly don’t have to physically store the business card and still keep the business card on file for a long period of time.  Furthermore, it reduces the expense on printing business card and stay green!

Handing out your business card one by one certainly is not the optimal way to distribute your business card nowadays.  Changing the way we distribute business card in an emerging world doesn’t seem to overwhelm people.  In fact, it takes business card to a whole new aspect which creates new opportunities and value  to businesses.

As we all know, exchanging information electronically can easily create a tsunami effect in the digital world we are living in.   It won’t take too much time and be too difficult to recognize how efficiently and effectively you can spread your business card through the internet to any corners of the world where your potential prospects are.  Sharing information online is not a science project anymore.  However, sharing your business card online takes you to the next level of information sharing.  The compelling reason is it carries your business logo and tagline along with the business information in a consistent and professional format as it is when you hand over your business card in person.

Making your business card available and sharing it online will definitely be ahead of your competitors in terms of online presence.  You want people surfing the web repetitively come across your company logo as it appears on your business card which is no doubt a more prominent way to help people remember your business comparing to seeing plain text information.  Click here to make your business card available online in a few simple steps.

How long can a business card live before it goes to the trash can or buried alive under the drawer? I have seen many many business cards being abandoned on the street.  I am so tempted to pick it up everytime when I see a business card on the ground.  Business card is such an inexpensive and powerful marketing tool.  There are tons of articles out there explaining how to maximize the value of a business card.  I see two most important values: 1) brand recognition, 2) information sharing, a business card should deliver before its life come to an end.  We often think a business card’s life span is very short, could be as short as 10 seconds when you handed it off to someone.  I don’t have a good memory, it often takes repetitive occurrence for me to get thinks into my memory.  If a business card is such an important marketing tool but living in such a short life, why can’t there be methods to prolong its life?  Similar to digitizing photographs, making digital business card not only can have a much longer(could be forever) life span but also open up a huge opportunity of faster and wider spread of a business card.  It also reduces the amount of trees being cut daily in our already endangered nature.  Going into digitizing a business card definitely provides a better chance to convert a prospect into a client by offering the prospect more opportunity to review the business card.

I am surprised to find out how many common practices we have around world.  I gathered a few of them I can think of but obviously there might be more out there I missed as the world is converging into one culture – internet.

While people are taking a break from their computers, here is  a list of things they have in common no matter where you go.

1. Handshaking – I am sure it is easy to remember when was the last time we SMS, IM, or Twitter!  Can you think of when was the last time you shake someone’s hand?
2. Exchanging Business Card – Most business people do that daily, but what do they do about the business cards they received?  Isn’t it nice to just send/share business card electronically?
3. Mummification – Don’t be surprise that you can still find this service out there in this modern world.   There are plenty of demands from pet owners.  I have seen a human mummy dated back 2000 years ago.  It is interesting to see how well it actually preserves human body or animal body.
4. Tipping – Although this is discretionary, it is fairly common and exists in any kind of restaurant or service for a very long while.  Tipping is like a reward for a good work.  But whether you deserve a good service doesn’t base on how much tip you will be paying. For some cultures, like the Japanese,  good service doesn’t mean high tips.  You should expect quality service for what you are paying for.
5. Personal Space – Everyone has their own definition and their own way to protect their personal space.  It is quite easy to notice that when you try to stand close to someone you don’t know, you will get an instantaneous eye gaze from that person.   I relate this to the behavior of ownership.  Will you feel irritated when someone is staring at your girlfriend?  What about you ask yourself the same question if it is your ex-girlfriend instead?

What is our chain of thought when we need something at the very moment?  A common reaction which most of us will do is start calling up our relatives and friends.  It is getting popular now people read online reviews to get references of a product or service.  You would defintely save time, for example, to find out whether you are going to the right place for dinner by looking up places your friends picked for dinner most of the time rather than reading reviews from someone you don’t know.  Sharing your business cards to your relatives, friends, co-workers is like sharing your experience.  I see that is more trustworthy and less hassles when you have an immediate need on something.  I see that is also a way to communicate and learn about that person whom share the business card with you such that next time when you have chance to go out dinner with that person, you know where to go and what to eat.

I have read so much about the new ebook from Amazon just a few weeks back.  It wasn’t a new idea as Sony has introduced their version of ebook couple years back.  I guess it is good to the economy as they are pumping huge amount of money to advertise their new device, just like our lovely Apple products.  You basically will see Apple’s ads almost everywhere you go.  Eventhough there are more and more new gadgets coming to life, the traditional industries like newspaper is being replaced not just because more and more people read news online.   It is because more and more people getting things done online which causes the main stream revenue of the traditional newspaper business has gone to online advertising companies.

It was my first time hearing many newspapers are going out of business or changing their edition entirely online this year.  Going online doesn’t sound too bad for me as I am attached to an electronic device almost 16 hours a day.   When I was young, I have to learn calligraphy in school and used to do a lot of handwriting work.  Today, I can easily count how many words I have written per day.  I can be certain that my handwriting skill was long gone and my handwriting is like a perfect storm.  Calligraphy and printing are both an art form today, how can we turn computer skill into an art form?  As lots of things are computerized these days, people type more than they write.  Is it laziness or efficiency!?  We always say to people how beautiful their writing is.  Is there a way to praise someone’s typing skill?