Don’t Bring Business Cards to Affiliate Summit

4 January
47 Comments
by nickycakes

american-psycho-business-card-scene

Every time a conference rolls around, people start talking about business cards.  For the first Affiliate Summit, Nickycakes had some pretty pimpin’ cards.  They were American Psycho worthy for sure.

This seemed like a good idea.  Buy cards, get a card holder, and that way you can look professional and give your card to people you meet at the show.  Great, right?

Well here’s what really happens.  The people you’re mostly interested in meeting at shows are other affiliates.  When you meet them, you either already know them online through a forum, have them on aim already, or you exchange numbers, aim, whatever when you meet.  It takes a couple seconds to whip out your phone and put in someones number or aim instead of taking their business card, putting it in your pocket, taking that home, shuffling through all your cards, remembering who gave it to you, and then emailing them asking for their aim or whatever if you make it through all those steps.   Silly.  Don’t ask for peoples cards, just get their phone number or aim if you need it.

Giving out your card is even worse!  Nickycakes, at his first Affiliate Summit, walked through the entire exhibit hall and talked with nearly every exhibitor.  There were  a LOT of them. Each one would give their silly sales pitch and then ask for your business card.  It seemed polite to just give it to them.  Some booths had raffles where you could win a laptop or something just by dropping your business card in the fishbowl.  Innocent, right?  Here’s what happens.  The people you actually want to do business with, you will likely get in touch with immediately after the show, eliminating the need for all the business cards you handed out to companies that you will never work with.  Regardless, a week or two after the show (it will be a monday), all of the companies will hand their entire stack of accumulated business cards to the newest lackey at the company and tell them to call each of them and try to do some business with them.  So this terrible monday after the show your phone will be ringing off the hook with calls from Joe Donkey at Snuggie trying to get you into their awesome affiliate program.  It SUCKS.

DON’T BOTHER BRINGING BUSINESS CARDS.  Total waste of money and time.  When people ask, do yourself a huge favor and say you forgot them.

Some people got so frustrated with this practice that they started taking business cards from companies and then using those business cards as their own business cards when booths would request them later. (nickycakes does not endorse this practice, hilarious as it may be).

Ok, this brings us to an email Nickycakes, as well as probably every other ASW attendee, got the other day called “Do you poken at Affiliate Summit?”  Was it a typo?  How do you poken?  Oh, it’s actually a product name (NOUN) desperately trying to be forced into verb status in an awful marketing campaign.  Gotcha.

So what is Poken?  Poken takes the idea of carrying business cards and somehow manages to make it much MUCH worse.  Here’s how it works:

This is a Poken

This is a Poken

This thing just screams professionalism, right?  Ok so here’s how easy it is to network with a Poken:

1) First you buy one of these things for $20.  They come in plenty of forms, all of them resembling a toy you’d buy for your toddler if you lived in japan.
2) Then you sign up on the website and go through the process of making an account, entering all your info, uploading a picture, etc.  EASY!
3) Ok, so then you go to a trade show and find other people that have Poken as well!
4) So now you want to share info.  Here’s the great part, you touch your two pokens together.
5) You wait for the little light to light up. But the fun doesn’t stop here!
6) You then wait until you get home, plug the poken into your computer via usb.
7) Log into your account, download all the contact information you accumulated and view it.
8) At this point, it’s unclear if you can sync it directly with your phone, although that seems unlikely, so it looks like you’ll have to still…
9) manually enter their info into your phone if you actually want to call them.

This entire process will likely span several hours (minimum) to several days (maximum)

Here’s a hilarious video if that’s not enough:

Please note the original soundtrack with 2 entire notes removed from “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”.  Anyone wanna touch Stiffan’s Poken?

Let’s compare this to how Nickycakes can share his entire contact information with another Blackberry user:

  1. Hit “compose email”
  2. Ask for their email address
  3. Enter their email address
  4. select “attach contact” and choose “Nickycakes”
  5. hit send

That’s 30 seconds max, and they now have all of Nickycakes’ info in their phone, instantly, and they don’t have to carry some extra piece of crap around everywhere and preform some silly ritual heavily laced with flamboyant overtones.  The real question is, who the hell thought this idea was good enough to invest money in, and how many peoples hands did this idea have to go through to get to the manufacturing and marketing process without someone cluing them in that it’s completely retarded?  Are people seriously going to pay $20 to inconvenience themselves while looking like a douchebag in the process?

It seems the manager of the poken affiliate program at shareasale has offered bloggers a free poken if they write about it, *ahem*, so feel free to get in touch with nickycakes to have his free poken shipped asap.

If you’re wondering which Poken Nicky wants, feel free to send one of the two African American pokens:

poken-rapstar-104 obama-104x78

Poken Rapstar and Obama Poken?  You guys have some real marketing geniuses over there, huh?  You should add “Crack Slangn’ Poken” and “Late Child Support Poken” while you’re at it if you want some more stereotypes!  ::facepalm::  (Don’t worry Asians, they have you well represented with Ninja and Geisha Pokens)

Just watch your back guys cause you never know when some guy is gonna surprise you and poken you from behind when you aren’t looking!  (Pay attention, poken marketing squad, that’s how you properly use your noun product name as a verb and make it stick)

Long story short?  Take your blackberry and don’t bother with business cards.  Feel free to grab them from the companies you seriously want to work with, if you’re too lazy to put it in your phone at the moment.  Oh you have an iPhone for business purposes?  Well you’re a moron.

Keep it real.

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