Vizibility Mobile Business Card

Despite the advance of social networking, business cards have stayed the same for decades. They might have your email address, Twitter handle, or LinkedIn user name, but they're still card stock rectangles you have to keep track of, with information you have to enter manually. Vizibility offers an update to the old-school business card with its Mobile Business Card service, a combination of online business card hosting, Web search analytics, and Web, QR code, and NFC tools to bring as many people as you can to your online business card. The service is free, but most tools are only available through the premium membership levels.

Free and Premium Tiers
Vizibility offers three service tiers, including a free basic level that includes a hosted business card, online buttons, links, and a QR code, along with self service setup and support. Premier costs $3 per month or $29 per year. It lets you brand your mobile business card with your logo, adds personal monitoring and alerts for when people search for you, and even geographically tracks scans and clicks of your card. The Premier Pro service is $9 per month or $99 per year, and adds a personal Google AdWords campaign, 240 QR code stickers, and an NFC mobile wallet card.

Physical products like the NFC business card and QR code stickers make refreshing your business cards easy. These can be ordered separately from your subscription at $15 each (for a single business card or 240 QR code stickers). A batch of 250 business cards printed with the QR codes costs $19.99. (But you can also just save the QR code graphic and use it in a custom business card template with any printer.) For your existing business cards, you can add the stickers for scannable QR codes instead of manually adding your information. The QR code stickers get smudged very easily, so you have to be careful when applying them, however.?

So how does it all work? When someone scans your QR code or NFC card, or clicks on a link provided to you by Vizibility (which can be embedded on your online correspondence), their device or browser is redirected to the mobile business card hosted on Vizibility's Web site (which you can preview on the Vizibility control panel, as seen to the left). The business card includes contact information, a photo, and links to your social networking profiles. It also lets the other party download or email the business card for use later as a contact. You can enable or disable any of these features, so you can share as little or as much information as you'd like. The mobile business card looks clean and simple on a smartphone, and it downloads as a universal vCard (.vcf) file that you can add to your phone or Google contacts easily.

As a more targeted form of promotion, the mobile business card can direct users to a curated list of Google search results. An additional tab in the control panel lets you see what comes up when you search for your name, and can add terms or remove them to create a more accurate list.

Tracking Contacts
The premium services are where Vizibility excels. The Web-based control panel is easy to use and intuitively designed, and gives you plenty of access to analytics for the people scanning your cards. It's separated into several tabs and sections that are clearly organized. You can change your contact details, get your QR code and link for Web pages, and monitor how many people are scanning your code or searching for you. It even lets you set the business card to send alerts whenever the card is scanned, or as a monthly email report. The tracking information includes the method of scanning (NFC business card, QR code, or Web button), organization or telecom service of the device that scanned it, city and state, and country.

If you want to forego physically exchanging cards entirely, the NFC business card puts all the link information on an NFC chip in a credit card-sized piece of plastic. Just tap the card to any NFC-enabled smartphone or tablet and the user will be directed to your online business card. Unfortunately, since iPhones and iPads still don't support NFC, Apple device users will have to scan the QR code printed on the card.

The idea of a digital business card is a natural progression in the world of social networking, and Vizibility offers a comprehensive package to bring it all together. You could conceivably create your own with a Web site and print out your own QR codes, but Vizibility offers that for free. The premium tiers offer comprehensive analysis of who scans your business card, and lets you market and track yourself better than you can easily do on your own. This makes the Vizibility Mobile Business Card?a great, inexpensive package with which to market yourself. The hardest part is to get people to scan your QR code or use NFC to pick up your info. Vizibility does the rest.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/_PNySpC2KIc/0,2817,2408969,00.asp

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