Lief Larson believes he’s onto something better than the business card (you generally swap those face to face, so yours will circulate only as widely as you do); better than print or online yellow pages (the focus there is on companies, so your personality and experience—the whole personal-relationship aspect of doing business—is missing); even better than networking sites on the Internet (they allow personal interaction, but operate as virtual walled gardens, where members connect with each other, but mostly in isolation from the rest of the Web).
Larson, cofounder and CEO of Workface, Inc., his two-year-old, angel- and self-funded company in Minneapolis, offers BusinessCard2 as an alternative better suited to the times. His product is a Web-based business card that gets posted at businesscard2.com and will show up as a match in an Internet search, but also can be “pushed out” to appear as an interactive ad on other Web sites.
BusinessCard2 will take off, Larson says, because just as marketing is targeted to more and more specific audiences, what’s being marketed “is going to go down to an individual level,” an individual’s “professional brand.” Some transactions will always be about price or product specifications, he acknowledges, but in the services area in particular, “we do a lot of our buying on a one-to-one basis.”
Since his site launched last April, several hundred people in the Twin Cities region and several thousand more from other states and countries have created and posted business cards at businesscard2.com, according to Larson. They do it at no charge, and people who search through cards in any of the site’s 142 industry categories likewise pay nothing.
Larson says that beginning in November, for a fee that starts at $25 a month, BusinessCard2 users will be able to deploy Workface’s “IdentityBroadcasting” technology to broadcast their cards as ads that will appear on the Web sites of Twin Cities TV and radio stations and other media outlets. He’s working this fall to establish those relationships. (Disclosure: Twin Cities Business is evaluating Workface’s technology, but as this story goes to press, has not chosen to partner with the company.) The interactive business card-ads will appear based on their relevance to the other content someone is viewing on those media sites. A person reading a news story about manufacturing, for instance, might see the BusinessCard2 of a local contract-manufacturing representative, then by rolling a mouse over the ad, be able to call up a comment form and send that rep an e-mail message.
Patrick Becker of Air Power Equipment in Minneapolis says he’s already picked up new business from his BusinessCard2. “LinkedIn is cool, there’s a lot of people on it, but it’s really limited in its ability to fully network yourself,” Becker says. “BusinessCard2 is just more interactive.”
