How to Network With Only One Business Card

Picture this: You’ve just made it into your conference or networking event and started mingling with a small group of three next to the bar. You’ve broken the ice and get to the customary details exchange so you reach into your wallet only to find you have just one measly business card left. Not only do you have three potential leads in front of you you’ve still got the whole day or night of networking to go.

Sound familiar? Well in this day and age there might finally be a viable escape route for this situation – Evernote. Evernote is popular notetaking and archiving application available on smart phones and iPad devices. Although Evernote sports a host of features the one most pertinent to this situation is its ability to recognize and extract text within an image which is done using OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition).

So back to your predicament, instead of letting part with your one last business card, with their smart phones they can snap a picture of your business card Evernote will timestamp it, capture your GPS location thus recording where and when they met you and extract your name, title and contact details from your card. This is a much better value proposition on both sides as now you’re sure they have indeed recorded your details, which avoids your business card getting lost within in their mountain of business cards and you’ve just saved a small fortune on buying more business cards and avoided a night of awkward moments.

Of course you have to assume they already have the Evernote app installed. However, with 5 million users and 18000 new users a day, luck may be on your side. And if not you can look super savvy by turning it around and instead snap their business cards and give a smart spiel of Evernote and OCR.

So there you have it - how to network at a conference or networking event with only one business card. Unfortunately we cannot take credit for this solution as the use case came from Tyler Crowley on a discussion with Phil Libin the founder of Evernote – on This Week in Startups. We have included the video below starting at the discussion although we highly recommend you check out the whole video especially if you’re a tech entrepreneur or want to learn more about Evernote.