BUSINESS ETIQUETTE
Fewer now use business cards
• Revenue from
the printing of business cards has declined 13 percent in the last five years.
LOS ANGELES —
Chalk up another looming casualty of the Internet age: business cards.
Ubiquitous as pinstripes, the 2-by-3.5-inch pieces
of card stock have long been a staple in executive briefcases.
Exchanging cards helps to break
the ice and provides a quick reference for forgotten names.
But to many young and Web-savvy people who are
accustomed to connecting digitally, the cards are irrelevant, wasteful — and
just plain lame.
Diego Berdakin, the founder of
BeachMint Inc., a fast-growing Santa Monica, Calif., e-commerce site,
has raised $75 million from investors without ever bothering to print up a set.
He doesn’t see the point.
“If someone comes in to meet me,
we’ve already been connected through email, so it really doesn’t feel like a
necessity in my life,” he said.
“When I go into a meeting and
there are five bankers across the table, they all hand me business cards and
they all end up in a pile, in a shoe box somewhere,” he added.
U.S. sales of business cards have
been falling since the late 1990s, according to IBISWorld Inc., an Australian
business data company whose data go back to 1997.
The slide appears to be
accelerating. Last year printers posted revenue of $211.1 million from the segment. That’s down 13 percent
from 2006.
Many under-30 tech entrepreneurs
see the paper rectangles as an anachronism, so they are turning to digital
options.
About 85 million people have a
professional network on LinkedIn. Some 77 million smartphone users have
downloaded the Bump app, which allows them to bump their phones together and
instantly exchange contact information.
Others carry a personalized
quick-response code that smartphones can scan like a hyperlink. And, of course,
there’s always Face-book, email and digital business cards.
If they do take a paper card,
some said they use a smartphone app to snap a picture of it and instantly
digitize the card’s information. Then they toss it
into the nearest trash can.
“Paper is not so appealing to
this generation,” said Kit Yarrow, chairwoman of the psychology department at
Golden Gate University in San Francisco who has studied Generation Y: the 20- to
30-year-olds who grew up with the Internet. Sam Friedman, co-founder and chief
executive of Parking in Motion, which sells a mobile app for finding open
parking spaces, said his San-ta Monica firm’s digital presence is its most
effective communication tool.
“The business card is your
website,” he said.
Still, old habits die hard.
Friedman said he makes sure his employees are issued business cards, which
sometimes come in handy at conferences.
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