Have you ever had the dreaded moment when you meet someone interesting and were completely out of business cards? This normally happens to me when I’m at a party. I don’t know about you, but when I’m headed to a back yard bar-b-q or raging house party, bringing my business cards is the last thing I worry about. Last weekend I ran into some people that were interested in doing some business so I had to do the perfunctory slap your pocket where the business card would have been like you were going to grab one and apologize for coming back empty handed. Well fellow networking professionals, you can send and receive contact info by sending text messages with your cell phone. So far, I’ve found 3 services that do just that with out typing out an epic text.
Drop Card is one of the first services I checked out. All you have to do is text “drop [email protected]” to 77950 and a neat html based e-mail will be sent to the address you specified in the text message. You can have 2 different profiles which is pretty cool if you want to keep your business and personal contacts separate.
You get 25 free drops a month but if you need more than that you have to upgrade to the premium service. Aside from more monthly drops, premium service allows you to customize the e-mail that gets sent with a company logo. Overall, it works as advertised but, most users will need more than 25 drops a month.
This free service is handy if you have a phone that can send text messages to an e-mail addresses. All you do is have the recipient text “YourUserName” to [email protected] then TxtMs will reply with your contact info. Unlike the other services, you are afforded more control over your information since you have the ability to authorize each requests for your info. There is also an automatic approval setting so you don’t have to micro manage it if you choose not to.
One thing to note is that I’ve got an iPhone and have yet to figure out how to send text messages to e-mail address. I’ve been able to use the Txt Ms system but only by sending the text messages through Google Voice’s web site.
This one is my favorite so far. It’s still in Alpha so a lot could change in the coming months but, it’s got two things on its side: simple and free. All you do is have someone text your user name to 50500. They will receive a text message back with all your contact info. You can also directly send your contact info to another person by texting the recipients phone number to 50500.
So, next time you are out and about with out your business cards, at least one of these services will have you covered.
As a final note, when I was researching ways to get Txt Ms to work with my iPhone I came across this cool little tutorial that will show you how to text some pretty cool special characters like music symbols, stars, hearts etc….