Review: Moo.com

I've had business cards for a long time.  Currently, I have business cards for my job with Sears as an appliance salesperson.  Prior to that, I had business cards with Future Shop for the same job, and prior to that, a succession of business cards while working with WIS International.  Though these were company related business cards, in the last several years I have made sure that my cards always included either my personal cell phone number or personal email address.  This has enabled my customers to reach me even when I'm away from work, and that is crucial to a commission salesperson.

The thing is that the cards I have right now, though, state that I'm an appliance salesperson at Sears.  While these are great for giving out while at work, they are of questionable value when meeting people at school functions or while out exploring new opportunities.  So a few weeks ago I decided that I would go out and purchase myself some personal business cards.  The website I chose to use was Moo.com . 

There are a number of business card sellers online, but I chose Moo.com because of the excellent design tools that they provide on their website.  First, of course, you pick your card type.  I looked at their Luxe card options (heavy paper stock, glossy finish, etc) and their standard card options, but I decided to go with their MiniCards.  These are smaller than normal business cards, measuring about half the size of a normal card.  I figured that they would stand out when I handed one out - just another way to be instantly memorable.  I also chose the MiniCards after reading some reviews that indicated Moo.com's normal cards were just slightly larger than a standard business card.  If that is really the case, smaller is definitely preferable to larger.

Once I had chosen to go with MiniCards, I got to design the cards using the online design tool.  Being able to pick from the wide selection of designs available, rather than having to provide my own, was a real weight off my shoulders.  It made the process a whole lot easier.  You get to choose the picture that goes on the back of the card, then tailor the information on the front of the card using a simple template.  I chose two different designs, Skyscrapers and Warren Peace. I picked these designs not only for the simply black and white graphics on the back, but because of the section on the front where you could insert a picture.  One of the great things about Moo.com is the ability to create and insert QR codes into the cards. I created a QR code that pulls up my linkedin account when you scan it, and inserted that into the picture section.  So the cards I created not only have funky, yet tasteful, pictures on the back and all my pertinent information on the front, but they also have a QR code for easy access to my professional information.  Moo.com really helped me bring it all together!

The one downside to Moo.com, I thought, would be the shipping.  The company takes quite a while to ship to Canada - despite ordering the cards on September 15th, and choosing the priority shipping option, my estimated date of delivery was October 3rd.  That's quite a wait.  Thus, it was a very pleasant surprise when I came home this past Thursday night to find my cards waiting for me.

Everything was as I expected.  The paper and print quality is fantastic and the QR code works exactly as advertised.  200 MiniCards ran me 60$, but most of that was actually shipping.  Once I get low on this batch I'll definitely be picking up another one.  

Here's the final product!

(I actually got 30 (!) different pictures for the back of these cards.  Most people get a pretty unique card, in other words.)

(The links to Moo.com are referral links that provide readers to the blog with a 10% discount off their purchase.  If you do end up using the referral link, make sure to let me know in the comments.)

'A Brand Called You' Does Not Go Far Enough

I recently re-read A Brand Called You, by Tom Peters, for our Career Management class, and I had something of a strange reaction to it.  If you're not familiar with the article, it's essentially an introduction to personal branding. I read the article for the first time back in the early 2000s, when I was reading through other Tom Peters books like A Passion for Excellence and In Search of Excellence (two must-read business books).  It was my introduction to personal branding.  I was a manager for a company called Western Inventory, and I really did take the lesson to heart (though I disagreed with Peters about loyalty to a company - I was incredibly loyal to my employer at the time), incorporating the concept of branding into my communications and professional development.  It really did work for me at the time.

As I re-read the article though, I was really struck by how old it seemed.  Peters was describing a world that used to exist, but which I no longer recognize.  I've been sitting here trying to put my finger on exactly what it is that bothers me about the article, and I think I've finally got it:

Peters was writing about a period of time during which people only knew other people directly or by at most secondary contact.  Peters was describing the need for branding in a pre-connected world.  He was describing a world where branding was optional.

Branding is not optional.

We now live in a world where most people who have a meeting with you will google you before that meeting.  We live in a world where the things you did five years ago are as prominent in a Google search as the things you did yesterday.  We don't have a choice whether or not we want to be a brand; our lives, personal and professional, are online for the world to see.  We are all brands.  The question then becomes how we manage those brands.

And this is where I really differ from Peters.

Peters says: "the Web makes the case for branding more directly than any packaged good or consumer product ever could. Here's what the Web says: Anyone can have a Web site. And today, because anyone can ... anyone does! So how do you know which sites are worth visiting, which sites to bookmark, which sites are worth going to more than once? The answer: branding."

I think The Brand Called You really shows its age here.  It was written before we actually experienced the web on a large scale.  The web didn't teach us the importance of branding, it taught us the importance of substance. Millions of websites existed, and the ones that users decided were worth visiting, worth bookmarking, worth returning to, weren't chosen because of their branding.  They were chosen because of their content.  Google, Rotten Tomatoes, eBay, Amazon, twitter, FaceBook, linkedin... none of these sites were brands first and products second.  The product came before the brand.  The substance came before the style.  The style was chosen to fit the substance, not the other way around.  In a world where web users could pick and choose at their own leisure, they chose substance and content over style and branding.

And that's where the world of work has come.  We are each a website (literally, in the case of our linkedin or FaceBook profiles). Potential clients and employers are our users.  They can find out everything about us by typing our names in to Google.  The more we connect online, the less control we have over what they'll find.  We need to manage our brands, to be sure, but more than that we need to ensure that regardless of what our users find out about us online, that we have the substance to overcome minor problems in style.

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(Image sourced via GIS and taken from No to the Quo's website)