What Business Cards Need Today

I have a nice black container on my desk, the sort of useful prop you'd find at the Container Store, for holding miscellaneous things. I use mine for business cards. Lots and lots of cards. As they come in, I put them in the box. And when the box starts to overflow, then it's time to get the data into my computer where it will be easier to access.

There's rarely a good time for this sort of thing. Maybe a Friday night when I'm stuck at home with the kids. There are worse things to do on Friday nights, right? At least I can watch something like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon while typing.

Piles of cards

One thing struck me as I began to enter the business card data into my laptop. Look at all the data business cards convey. "Traditionally speaking", a business card would contain the following, at a minimum:

• Name of person and position
• Name of company/organization
• Logo and tagline
• Phone
• Address
• Fax

A few additional fields could include a toll-free number, direct line numbers with extensions, and maybe even a photo of the cardholder (mostly real estate agents do that, but I do too). In the 1990s, with the advent of the Internet and mobile phones, we started adding:

• Website URL
• Email Address
• Mobile Numbers, Pagers (remember those?)

So it's started getting a bit crowded for the 3.5"x2" standard business card. Now mix in the Social Media of recent years. That means we're adding user names and links for:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Do We Still Need All This?

That's 12-14 fields, not counting any graphic elements you want to add, or just white space. It's starting to be a mess. But do we still need all this information on our cards? Is having a URL enough to point people to a place to learn more? Can we rely on the user to look on our website for links to Twitter?

Do most of us even need fax numbers anymore? If you're like me and get faxes once in a blue moon, maybe the number isn't so important and can be left out. The business card should highlight your pertinent information, not every detail. So what's considered pertinent these days?

As I work on new business cards for myself later this year, I'll need to decide. I'm definitely keeping the name, company and logo. Website URL and Email. At least one phone number. But I'm not sure about the others. Do I need to include a street address? Fax? Twitter?

I'm sure the day is coming when paper business cards are no longer used, and we just wave our cell phones towards each other to exchange data. But I'm not ready to get rid of mine yet. Just improve it.

What do you think? Leave your comments below.

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