I posted some thoughts on business cards awhile back, had used up the ones I had and was time to get some more, especially with the PASS Summit coming up and a greater emphasis on networking. I’m breaking with tradition, sorta, this time!

First, I decided to order some cards from Moo.com. I ordered the mini-Moo, $20 for 100 of them. Not cheap, but the interesting part is that you can customize the back of each card. If you want, you can do 100 different images or messages. Makes sense it that it doesn’t cost them any to print various images, the customer is doing the work! On the ‘front’ side I went with my name, email address, and LinkedIn URL, plus a short tag line. No phone no address. On the back, with more time I might (might!) have done something fancier, but instead I opted to create 20 different ‘backs’, each a quote about time management or leadership in assorted fonts and patterns. Took maybe 15 minutes to do it, UI is very usable. Got the cards, they are small – will that both people? Will the quote on the other side make me more memorable? At worst I tried something new.

On the traditional side I ordered 500 plain-ish cards with logo, my name, email, LinkedIn info – skipping address and phone. Does it matter? We shall see. I looked at few places and business cards are definitely a hot market, everyone selling them, everyone upselling stuff like crazy. Better paper – more money. Upload an image – more money. Custom two sides – more money. It’s easy to do something and have a set of $50 business cards. Of course I spent that much at Moo, but for plain cards…just seems excessive. Finally used 123Print.com, still $28. Still too much I think, but it went from fun to a pain in about 9 minutes.

So I don’t yet, did I waste time, or give myself a bit of an edge? Or both! I’m going to try both sets and try to watch reactions, see if anything seems to work or not work.