Last week I met up with my old colleagues at a Happy Hour 2.0 in La Jolla. It was the perfect opportunity to catch up with them since I recently started a new job and to mingle with other marketers, developers, and other web people. The only drawback was that I didn’t have my new business cards or any moo cards to hand out. Fortunately, HeyStephanie.com was easy for my new friends to remember and I was able to get by with giving my email address.
Meanwhile, I still don’t have any new business cards so in the interim, I had to find a solution to my business card dilemma. Luckily, I stumbled across MyDropcard.com which lets you easily share your contact info with your phone—for free!
Once you’ve registered and entered all of your contact information at the site, you’re good to go. As if that wasn’t cool enough, you can create two separate profiles; one for business and the other for personal contacts.
When you meet someone new, simply text “drop” and their email address to “41411″ and Dropcard will deliver your contact info directly to their email. You can even add your social network profiles on your dropcard (i.e. LinkedIn) or your blog.
Dropcard also has convenient text messaging shortcuts so you don’t have to waste so much time texting. For example, you can replace the “@” symbol when typing your friend’s email address with a space and Dropcard will know what you mean. And if your friend’s email is on Gmail, even better! Text “drop” and their email address without “@gmail.com” and you’re done. For more ways to cut your text time, check out more Dropcard shortcuts here.
Not only is this handy, it sure beats carrying 100+ business cards to hand out at a conference. On top of that, soon they’ll be offering users more features (i.e. personal logo, attachments, statistics, etc.) for $4.99 a month. That might be helpful for the hardcore networkers.
So what about you? Is there a different service that you use to send contact info to colleagues through your phone? What would you do in this type of situation?
The Admins want you to create a one of a kind header to represent our social network. You can start from scratch, use Wordle as a background, or incorporate the 20SB badge in your design. Headers must be 955×200 pixels.
Each 20SB member can submit up to 5 entries but don’t forget, the contest ends August 3, 2008 and all entries must be submitted to the 20SB Header Contest Flickr Group.
While the prize for the winner is still to be determined, I think bragging rights is sufficient. For complete details of the contest, visit the 20SB blog and to spark your creativity, here’s my submission to the contest:
If you’re not already a member of 20SB, it’s not too late to sign-up.
20SB is a great community of active bloggers that are all approaching, in the middle, or just past their quarter life crisis. WIth over 1900 members and more than 100 groups, you’ll find a diverse community and plenty of reading material to get your creative juices flowing for your next blog post.
In fact, 20SB is full of activities with blogger meetups, blog swaps, and is currently in the process of rolling out category specific RSS feeds for everyone. Click here for more information about the RSS feeds.
What I like most about 20SB is the active forum, the friendly folks, and the fact that anyone can nominate a member to be a featured blogger on the homepage. Even more exciting is the fact that the group has recently been added to Alltop and thanks to Zakstar, a 20SB group has been added to LinkedIn.
Wordle lets you create “word clouds” from an RSS feed, a del.ici.ous username, or you can paste in a bunch of text to generate you word cloud.
Once you have the text all set, you can tweak your word cloud with different layouts, fonts, and color schemes. And because images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, you can use your Wordle on anything from book covers to T-shirts. I added my Wordle to my new Contact page.
Just remember to let people know how you created your Wordle. If you took an image from the Wordle gallery, don’t forget to mention where you got it from.
Thanks to Andrew, author of The Working Title, for highlighting Wordle in his blog. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have found out about this awesome site. And kudos to Jonathan Feinberg for creating Wordle, I absolutely love it.
I stumbled across Kristen Nicole’s article on Mashable titled, “Use Flickr for Custom Capital One Cards” and thought it was a great campaign for several personal reasons.
First, Capital One makes it simple to create a personalized credit card. I already have a Capital One card but now I can select a photo that’s already hosted on my Flickr account or simply upload a jpeg from my PC and make it more fun. See upload guidelines here.
Second, by using a personal photo I’m creating an emotional attachment with my credit card. When I’m in the middle of a transaction, do I whip out my boring debit card or use my fancy customized Capital One card? Chances are, I’m going to whip out the Capital One card then chat with the clerk on how fun it was customizing my credit card and tell her where she can go online to create her own!
It would have also been interesting to see what would happen if the Capital One Image Card promotion ran a user-generated contest around the campaign. Let people create their custom Capital One card with their favorite photo then offer a prize (i.e. a $150 Capital One Gas Card) for the best design in a photo category (i.e. Family, Best Friends, Graduation, etc.).
People can engage longer with the promotion and check out what other people have designed and leave comments if they want to. And if they’re not interested in other people’s creations, they can still order their new card. That’s a great way of building brand awareness in my opinion, what do you think?
I know shameless plug… but I’m seriously floored by the quality of entries in Mr. X’s Design Challenge. Who knew so many people were into vintage rock posters? This is the second design challenge sponsored by Mr. X and he has 7 more challenges lined up until January 2009. Check out his other campaigns here.
The opinions blogged herein represent only those of Stephanie Gulley and do not reflect those of her employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.
