Lion's ROAR Marketing

About.Me Business Cards: Brand Yourself

You are your own brand.  This is something I’ve quickly learned while starting Lion’s ROAR Marketing.  People want to put a face with who they are interacting with.   In an effort to extend my branding and stay in tune with emerging technology, I took advantage of an offer by About.Me to have 50 About.Me QR code business cards made featuring Moi.

For those who do not know who About.Me is, check out a post I wrote earlier this year (my most successful post yet!).

This experience came to be about a month ago when I received an email from About.Me that described how as an About.Me user I was eligible to received 50 About.Me business cards.  Teamed up with MOO, an awesome business card developer out of Rhode Island, About.Me was also offering business cards with QR technology.   Not just any old business card.

Before taking About.Me on their offer, I had to educate myself on QR codes first.

Looking back through a previous Social Media Examiner article I failed to fully look through, I got a quick crash course on QR codes.  In a nutshell, QR codes are similar to barcodes in that they retain data but QR codes are far more robust.  Barcodes can only carry 20 characters of information, while QR codes can carry thousands.  This makes it possible to include information in a QR code to share a website, video, and even an E-book.  QR code apps are primarily available on Smartphones, so access to them is somewhat limited.  However, they are free to generate and have not been copyrighted by the company behind it, Denso Wave, based out of Tokyo, Japan (hence the freeness.).

To get a deeper look into how QR codes work and their uses, read more here from Social Media Examiner.

After realizing how my business cards could link people to my About.Me page where all my social networking presence is available and my own personal messaging, I was sold.

The process was very easy to obtain my business cards.  I just followed the links in the email and came to the MOO webpage which allowed me to play with various elements of my business card such as image size, QR code size, text on the front of the card and business card orientation.

The only slight downside to designing my business cards was that I wasn’t about to shrink my portrait image small enough to fit into the “safe-area” of the card.  Also, I wasn’t able to incorporate the logo of my business on the front.  This is due to the promotional deal limitations set between About.Me and MOO.  If you want to have more control of these design elements you have to work directly with MOO.  In addition, the About.Me/MOO partnership also requires you  pay $5.50 for standard shipping and can pay more in order to receive your cards earlier.

All in all, I feel About.Me users should absolutely take advantage of this offer since everything is free except shipping.  Also, QR codes are only going to get more popular.  Taking advantage of this free offer to harness this emerging technology now only makes smart business sense.

My cards are schedule to arrive by June 3rd.  Looking forward to sharing them with the world!  Thanks About.Me, MOO and Social Media Examiner.