Once again, I have not lived up to the retail industry’s Black Friday expectations. I didn’t buy any presents for anybody on Friday; all of my gift shopping this morning happened in indie physical stores; and this evening’s two online purchases were both business expenses that were going to happen at some point, with only one spurred by a holiday discount.
But the 400 business cards I ordered from Moo.com, my go-to vendor* since 2012, stand out in a different way: They don’t include my @robpegoraro Twitter handle, something that’s been a fixture in the design of my cards since the first batch I ordered in 2011.
I’ve talked about deleting that data point from my cards before. But the downward spiral of the platform now doing business as “X” under Elon Musk’s vain, clueless mismanagement has made that not just easier to contemplate but an overdue move.
Case in point: I’ve tweeted only 10 times this month while spending far more time on Bluesky and Mastodon, in that order of priority. And those tweets have yielded far less #engagement than my posts on those alternative platforms–my most-viewed tweet in November got 1,321 views but only yielded 17 click-throughs to the story I’d shared.
I do continue to visit Twitter to check up on particular accounts and a few lists that I’ve created, but overall that service has fallen far below the level of relevance that would justify it eating up scarce real estate on a mini-sized business card. So I deleted my handle from the card design and used the space saved to bump up the point size for my phone number and e-mail address–identifiers that can’t be undermined by a shitposting billionaire buying a social platform because he has delusions of “everything app” grandeur.
* If you’d like a Moo referral code good for a 25% discount, hit me up in the comments or send me an e-mail.
https://robpegoraro.com/2023/11/25/this-business-card-order-isnt-like-the-others/
#bizCards #BlackFriday #Bluesky #businessCards #businessCardDesign #ElonMuskTwitter #engagement #Mastodon #MooCom #TwitterHandle
