Buh-Bye Business Cards--Hello Dropcard

I read this post about the importance of remembering to bring business cards to business and social functions and was surprised neither the author nor any of the commenters knew about Dropcard.

I may not be the most eco-friendly person on the planet, but I do hate paper and try to have as little of it as possible in my life. (Would you believe I used to be the program manager for printing and writing papers at the American Forest & Paper Association?) This includes bills, bank statements, medical claims, appointments and, of course, business cards.

(Aside: I know I'm jinxing myself by saying this but, despite the fact that when I hold my Treo I literally hold my life in my hand by virtue of the fact that it is the sole container of my calendar and my address book, I have never synched it and if it dies or I lose it, there goes every contact and calendar appointment forever. I need to remedy this before the worst actually happens and I have to slit my throat over the loss of all my vital information.)

At any rate, with Dropcard, you create a virtual business card that you can email to anyone right from your phone. You just send a text with the intended recipient's email address to a number specified by Dropcard and your business card is magically sent to them. The dropcard is formatted to look like a real business card, and can include not only your traditional contact information, but your social networking details as well (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc). You can also create a personal card if you want to include different information for social purposes, such as your home address, phone number, email, etc.

And don't forget--if you ask someone for their card and they say they'll send you a dropcard, don't forget to do the white thing and say "Hey, thanks. Sincerely, The Earth."

Survey Says...25% of Twitterers are Old and White

Ok, not an actual survey--my own bootleg analysis based on cross-referencing my favorite book of the moment, Stuff White People Like, and this article in Time magazine about Gen-X being aTwitter.

According to the author of the Time article, Bill Tancer (author of Click: What Millions do Online and Why it Matters), Twitter's largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds. Of that demographic, the first group is, as Bill refers to it, "Stable Career" types: "a collection of young and ethnically diverse singles living in big-city metros like Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami.' The Stable Career tends to work in the arts and entertainment industry, drive small cars and espouse very liberal political views." Cross-reference that with Stuff White People Like and a case for a 100% match can be made: #47 Arts Degrees, #60 Toyota Prius, and #8 Barack Obama.

Bill calls the second largest group of the demographic "Young Cosmopolitan." "These are the 40-somethings. They're likely to drive a hybrid car such as the Toyota Prius, earn household incomes over $250,000 per year and also identify with very liberal politics." Again with the Toyota Prius and Barack Obama--and it's a given that white people have high household incomes so they can afford all the accoutrements of white life, of which there are too many to list here so you'll have to read the book.

Then the final slam dunk: the fact that both these groups "appear to be all-around Web 2.0 fans"--you'll need to check out #106 on the Stuff White People Like blog because it's not included in the book.

I rest my case.

Is the Whale Jumping the Shark?

First I thought it was me...suddenly half my followers were gone, as were more than half of the people I was following. Maybe yesterday's post recollecting the time my water broke offended people? Then I logged into my association's account and same thing--more than half of the hard-won followers had disappeared, as had half the list of people we were following--a list that took hours to research and compile.

Wait a minute, though...I was one of the people who stopped following my company, according to the much diminished list of followers; same with the other staff members who had been following. I know I didn't stop following, nor did they, so obviously this mass deletion of followers/followees was being orchestrated by Twitter itself.

So great--here I am, having just a few weeks ago convinced my association that they needed to be using Twitter, gotten it set up...and suddenly it appears that Twitter is deleting followers in attempt to wipe out spammers.

Now what? Just when the higher-ups at work were getting excited about Twitter I have to now go back to them and tell them that a bug in the system "accidentally" wiped out half our efforts?

As far as I'm concerned, Twitter may as well just shut down the studio at this point. It's like having your money stolen from the bank--once it's happened you're never going to trust that bank again and certainly won't be replenishing your looted-by-the-bank account. It's not like we had just dumped a contact list into our association's Twitter account; I can't recreate it without spending hours manually re-finding everyone we had added to begin with. Twitter claims that they'll be restoring lost follower/following relationships; I'm not holding my breath.

If companies everywhere were skeptical to begin with, how are they going to feel when they realize that Twitter is not actually the ultimate social media tool they'd finally believed it to be? When people realize that, at any given moment, well-thought out follower/following relationships can be wiped out in the blink of an eye will it lead to the whale's final demise?