By Deanna Ferrari
In the movie “He’s Just Not That Into You,” Drew Barrymore’s character has a great line about dating in the 21st century:
“I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he e-mailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”
It’s true, there are a lot of different ways to leave someone a message these days (and not just in the dating world). With the influx of new social media channels, there are dozens of tools to communicate with someone. If I meet a contact at a networking event, I can not only tell them to call or e-mail me, but also to tweet me, leave me a Facebook message or comment on my blog. So how do we keep track of it all? Enter online “business cards.”
At WordWrite, we’ve been using card.ly, a free service that allows you to create your own tiny online portfolio of contact information. It’s been a great service to show where we are on social networks without having to send ten different links to people. But a few months after we created our card.ly account, I noticed flavors.me, a similar service that calls itself a website rather than a business card or portfolio. I’m sure there are others. To help illustrate the benefits of these tools, let’s look at these two and identify the differences so you can determine what’s best for your company. Let’s weigh the pros and cons:
Card.ly
Pros:
- A lot of options for social media channels, including Ustream for video streaming on the Internet and SlideShare to share PowerPoint and other slide decks
- vCard download available so contact info can be added to an e-mail address book
- Separate contact area for e-mail, phone, etc.
- A visual stream of all your network content is available on one page (only three of your networks are shown with a free account)
Cons:
- Ads on your card
- $24.99 a year to upgrade to a “premium” account that includes stats on how many people have downloaded your contact info, and a personalized domain name with your card.ly info
Flavors.me
Pros:
- Unique and clean looking
- You can access content right on the page without being redirected to another site as with card.ly???
Cons:
- Limited amount of services you can add (tell us what some of them are)
- Cannot add Facebook fan page, just profile page
- $20 a year to upgrade to a “premium” account that includes stats on downloads of your information, and a personalized domain name
Both of these sites offer a lot of great content and an opportunity to track visitors with an upgraded account. However, at WordWrite we will stick with card.ly right now as it allows us to link to our Facebook fan page as well as other networks that flavors.me doesn’t offer (at least not yet).
Let us know what you think. Which of our business card sites do you like better? http://card.ly/wordwritepr or http://flavors.me/wordwritepr?
Social media tool of the month is a regular feature on the WordWrite Storytelling Blog that appears monthly.
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Deanna Ferrari is an account executive for WordWrite Communications
