Advertising is one of the most neglected aspects of small business - probably because it costs money and it is often difficult to tell if the expense was worth it.
But one type of advertising that most agree is worth the expense is the lowly business card.
When you need something - insurance, parts, lessons, personnel - your first action will be to recall who you know that provides that service. Did Bob say he did that? And then off you go, thumbing through your Rolodex, looking for Bob's card and his contact information so you can give him some money.
I used to have a business card that listed all of my skills - artist, inventor, engineer, sculptor, columnist, poet, philosopher - but, as entertaining as the card was, it did not bring in much business. This, I learned, was because people want to do business with a specialist. They do not want you to get their engineering project confused with a philosophy lesson. In retrospect, I can see where that might make people nervous.
I have recently learned lots of secrets to having the perfect, productive, business card. This week I acquired an IRIS Business Card Reader (version II) to get all my contact info in order. I have thousands of business cards and can rarely find the person I want without a major desk reorganisation. This device was meant to correct all that.
The IRIS Business Card Reader was predominantly a PC-only gadget until recently. The people who developed optical character recognition (OCR) software made a version for OSX that turned out to be the best Mac OCR software. As a result, Mac people used it on their flatbed scanners to put business card data into their contact databases. Recently IRIS came out with a USB mini-scanner like its old PC serial port scanner, only this is Mac friendly. The scanner is pocket-sized - being less than two business cards long and 25mm thick - and perfect for travel.
Traditionally OCR applications have difficulty differentiating between the thousands of fonts found in business cards. They also confuse artwork and textured backgrounds with text, and produce spotty duplication. I will not say all that is behind us but I was impressed with the results I got from the IRIS. If a card was a new white business card, the scanner and application read it perfectly. If the card was heavily worn, the application read about 50 per cent of the data correctly.
