One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.

Another problem, is that you don't know who, from the meeting, after you gave them your contact, actually checked you out afterwards. You can't tell how many checked on you neither.

Here's an elegant and smart solution to alleviate this problem, provided it gets widely adopted. I'm sharing the concept in this old blog because I got increasingly positive feedback from friends, family and business contacts. Hopefully, maybe you'll experience it too.

It uses moo cards, the new goo.gl url shortener and url tracking service, a QR-code and the google profile web-site.

The idea is to hard link your google profile vanity page into your business card, with a QR-code, through the goo.gl shortener service, and then track the hits you get. It's very simple.


Here's how I implemented it (costing me a total of around 40$ for 100 business cards). I used moo minicards - I just *love* moo cards -.

  1. Shorten the url to your google profile using the new goo.gl service.(Look for the goo.gl chrome extension).
  2. Click on the "details" link from your goo.gl dashboard.
  3. Save the black&white image, encoding the goo.gl short url, - it's called a QR-code -.
  4. Import, select and crop facebook photos for the special 100 moo facebook minicards, using the moo web-site interface. Use these photos for the moo cards flip-side.
  5. On the front-side, jot down your contact and upload the QR-code image on the mug-shot holder.
  6. Complete the order and wait a couple of days until you receive your brand new moo minicards :)
  7. To test the solution, download a qr-code scanner for your smartphone (I use the free app neo-reader for iphone 3G) and try it out on your moo cards.
  8. After you offer your freshly baked cards to your contacts, check out the impact on the goo.gl analytics site.

A few comments: Actually, I edited the qr-code image and added the shortened url in arial fonts for manual input (as not everyone I know owns a smartphone *with* a barcode-scanner). At the time I did this (more than 6 months ago), the goo.gl service didn't have analytics and the mobile version of the google profile didn't exist yet. Finally, I used the google charts api to generate the QR-code image. Fortunately, all these services significantly improved to help this business card with hard-link solution.

It works great! Every time I demo it people look very interested and ask me more about the qr-code image. The only turn off is that, under dim lighting, the iphone 3G camera makes it hard for the qr-code scanner to detect the link, and it can take up to 20 seconds of waiting. But under natural daylight, it works in a split second!

Do you have any similar experience with your business cards? Would you care to share it here?
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