You Need to Be Easy
I’m perpetually baffled when I see websites that don’t give me a sense of the human being behind them. I receive business cards by the ton at conferences, and I’m surprised when they don’t offer a great deal of value per square inch of paper. In fact, my own personal business cards don’t offer enough value, so they will be replaced eventually. People of Earth: make it easy for others to reach you and communicate with you.
About Pages
On your About page on your website, have a blurb about the company, if you have to, but then follow it up with a human, preferably with a picture. For every “we” site, you now need a “me” person on the site. Why? Because we do business with PEOPLE, not with corporations. The corporations give us branding and other legal constructs, but we buy from humans.
What’s important to go on that page otherwise? Two things: why should people care about you is the first. Second, here’s a hint: how do you want people to do business with you? What kind of business do you hope they do with you? (By the way, upon reviewing my About page, I’ll rewrite it tonight or tomorrow).
Business Cards
I think business cards need to be informative over clever. Clever is nice, and cheap is still icky, but if you’re not giving people enough queues about yourself, your business, your locale, and your contact particulars, it’s not going to get you to the dance. What should go on cards these days?
- Name
- Title (clever is okay, but remember this is another judgment someone is making about you)
- Company Name (if there is one; if not, be you).
- Phone number, specifically the one you hope people will call you on. I use my cell.
- Email address. New world or not, email is still the way we tend to message folks.
- Company URL (if you have such a thing)
- Blog URL - this becomes more important these days, because you want to show your humanity, and/or what’s on your mind.
- City/Town and State/Province information. I never used to have this on my cards, and even though I like being virtual, it seems that when professionals are looking at my cards, they follow up by asking where I work. When I show them my CrossTech Media cards, they immediately ask me where Canton is in regards to Boston. So that tells me they’re trying to anchor me in space.
- Maybe a tagline about the kind of business you want to do with people.
What’s Your Take?
I’m curious to know what you think about this? How are you framing your about pages and your business cards? Are you easy?
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