How often do you hand out your business card? What kind of info do you include? I’ve designed cards chock full of contact information in teeny-tiny print, and I’ve designed cards with only a logo, name and email. It really depends on how you prefer people contact you (or how truly accessible you want to be).

Actionable business cards

Increasingly, the business card is also a call to action to visit a website or connect on social media, for example. This is a little bit awkward–does it make sense to include social media icons on print pieces, when they’re not clickable? Is the recipient really going to type in the long URL for that landing page? Ok, enter the QR code. Um, does anybody like these things? Because I can tell you designers hate them.

A new option: NFC technology

Moo.com is a popular site for affordable and unique business card printing, and has leveraged technology to provide cool products since its inception. And now they have a new product offering that I find pretty interesting: their “Business Cards+” are “high quality printed Business Cards, embedded with an NFC chip that triggers digital Actions.” Huh? Simply put, tapping one of these business cards against an NFC-enabled device will pull up specific information on the recipient’s phone: a website, an app, social media profiles, etc. And even better: you can manage your actions long after the cards have been printed, so if you post a new landing page or add a new social media profile you’d like to drive people to, you can change those settings in your account, and whoever has your business card will be directed to the new spot. Whoa.

biz_cards_plus

 

I’ve never designed NFC business cards. I can’t speak to how well this works (and I’m not paid by Moo for this post)–I just think this is a really smart application of technology to modernize the business card, a traditional piece of collateral that sometimes feels a bit silly in our digital world. And it’s way more slick and attractive than ugly QR codes.

If you want to try this, please let me know, because I would love to design something for you to see this technology in action!