Business cards have been around in some form or another for hundreds of years, so the digitization of this form of communication was inevitable. And the company that is integrating key features that are essential in today’s connected world is MOO.
The company recently announced its (Near Field Communications) NFC-enabled business card. You will be able to tweet business cards as well as incorporate links to maps, your homepage and more that will be linked to anytime one of the cards is passed near a NFC enabled device. This makes a lot of sense because, originally, cards were used to announce yourself socially. The idea of digitizing business cards comes from the company’s MOO labs. The goal was to bring the humble business card to the digital age, and by all accounts the company appears to have succeeded.
The Moo NFC Business Card+ has the same technology credit cards are using for contactless payments. With the NFC chip in the business cards, you can exchange digital details instantly.
The card’s smart functions are embedded into a matte laminated card within the layers of the paper. Using its silver nano printing technology and digital presses, the sky is the limit when it comes to the kind of digital information you can store on the card , and the digital actions carried out when you tap it on a mobile device.
The actions are made possible with the integration of an If This Than That formula. The technology creates connections between apps, such as Twitter, mobile devices and the MOO Business Card+. Just as the name implies, IFTTT, lets you create recipes that trigger an action from a given app. For example, you can create a recipe that would send a Tweet when the card is swiped near an NFC enabled smartphone.
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The card, along with IFTTT, can be programmed with many different actions. As it applies to tweets, you can set the date and time, which is important because Twitter doesn’t let you post two identical consecutive tweets. You can also tweet an image, send a direct message to yourself, update a profile picture and bio, and add users to a Twitter list.
In addition to tweets, you can make the cards call, message or save contact details. This includes linking your website, LinkedIn and other social networks, sharing playlists, inviting people to video conferences, sharing directions and much more. As long as the card is not destroyed, you can continue to change the way your card interacts indefinitely. This gives you a permanent digital connection with the people to whom you gave your business card.
Once you create your cards, the MOO Manage Paper+ app lets you change the actions on your card as many times as you like, while monitoring the amount of times your card has been tapped and how people are interacting with the information you provided in real-time.
With so many marketing strategies available for companies, this is a very affordable way to differentiate yourself. A small business can have 20 cards printed for $29.99 and really test the system to see if it pays off.
An article on The Economist about the staying power of business cards in the digital age explains, “Even at the trendiest of Silicon Valley tech gatherings, people still greet each other by handing out little rectangles made from dead trees rather than tapping their phones together.”
The MOO Business Card+ is still a rectangle or square made with dead trees, but it is much smarter too.
Image: MOO
I want to see a sample of this one so that I can think about how it can be useful for me and my business. I get that it is about tweeting business cards but I want to learn more about how it can benefit marketing. Wouldn’t it result in some security issues?
Isn’t this rather limiting to devises that not only have NFC capabilities (Apple is still holding out) but also to those users that have actually turned NFC capabilities on in their settings, which frankly most people have not. Wouldn’t it be better to have a QR code, which is visible and is able to be scanned on all devises with a free QR coded, which most devises come loaded with. Also, if you hand out a card with a NFC chip, do you really expect the recipient to remember there inside to scan it at a later date.
Hello Susan,
You are right about devices which doesn’t support NFC capabilities. There is need to have solution which gives ability to exchange contact information w/o any business cards at all, so that the thing you have to bring on some event is your smartphone only.
Cheers,
Eugene.
Hi Susan,
You make some great points.
As a business that prints business cards, you have to find ways to introduce digital technology into it. Only time will tell whether this will work for MOO, but marketers being marketers, they will find a way to make it part of campaign, no matter how small a role it plays.
At this point, and I could be wrong, and please let me know if you’ve got data on this, but I think folks in general are wary of NFC. It’s not mainstream enough. Personal checking account debit cards from 5-7 years ago which contained NFC [or some tech ancestor of NFC, I’m really not sure] in my opinion still get associated with the world of identity theft and notions of “one careless moment walking by the wrong person and you’ll face an identity theft nightmare”.
While a business card doesn’t contain bank information, I feel NFC and related technologies still trigger paranoia in a lot of people. And in order for people to feel fully comfortable, a widespread psychological change would need to happen first.