Business cards 2.0

Some time ago I was reading an article written by Bob Violino on internetevolution.com where he was talking about “Setting Policy on Corporate Avatars”. In this article he stated “Particularly for companies whose employees use social networking applications on the job, it makes sense to set guidelines for avatar use” and to some extend I agreed with him. He also referred to Gartner who predicts that by year’s end 2013, 70 percent of enterprises will have behavior guidelines and dress codes established for all employees who have avatars associated with the company inside a virtual environment.

In this light it will indeed be a standard that companies will give you a avatar. Specially in the light of the new trend emerging in business cards this can something we can not avoid. The new trend in business cards is Augmented reality. A very nice example can be seen below in the movie where you can see the combination of a old fashion business card and the way we will use business cards most likely in the future.

The problem however which I can see at this moment is that we the line between work and private will fade. We can already see this line fade at this moment, large companies are trying to evolve the way of working and call it “The New Way Of Working”. By the new way of working employees get lots more freedom, you can work when you want and where you want. As long as the job is done it is fine by those companies. If I look at myself, I do work for a large international corporation and they give me the freedom to work when and where to a certain extend. We do have offices around the country and I already ended up in some of them. Open your laptop and start working. They provide you the tools to communicate with everyone everywhere around the globe without any problem and we can read our mail on our cellphones.

The “downside” of this is that work and private mix. I do use my corporate business cards also for private contacts. I receive work related mail on my private mailbox and private mail in my work-mailbox. It is not a issue however the line is fading.

The ideal world should not provide a corporate business card, in a ideal world your employer should provide you with a business card with a link to a private online profile and a corporate profile where you can have on your corporate profile have a avatar in the corporate style while you can also have a look at my private avatar and profile. It might even be so that you can create a avatar which is a 3d virtual presentation of yourself in a business suite which can be called by augmented reality and also give the option to link to your facebook, linkedin profile, your weblog and website and your corporate website.

A good example of a mixed profile is shown in this movie from TAT.

As work and private life is mixing more and more we will also see this in for example business cards. Business cards will mix with augmented reality and with social networks. Some social networks will be pure private and will not be applicable to a corporate rule however can not be ruled out from ones life as a person. So simply stating that a corporate policy will be set for avatars is to easy. Companies will struggle a lot with the question how much freedom they can give employees with avatars. To much freedom can end up in embarrassing situations to less will scare some people away.

Tags: augmented reality

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Augmented reality, Trends & webx.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.