If you do business online, social media engagement is becoming more and more essential if you want to be taken seriously.  How better to advertise your presence on various social networks than to pull them all together in a snazzy digital business card?

At least, that’s the concept behind Card.ly, a new website that lets users do just that.  With Card.ly, all you have to do is enter in your usernames for the social networks you use (at least the ones you don’t mind potential employers seeing), and it pulls them together with your bio and contact information into a sleek “online business card.” Then, you get code that allows you to embed the card into your e-mail signature, web page or forum postings.

Card.ly is dead simple to use. It even pulled my Gravatar picture automatically.  It also pulls from pretty much every social network you can imagine, and most popular blogging platforms. You can customize your profile by choosing pre-designed skins. There’s a decent selection of free skins available, or for $24.99 per year you can get a larger selection, as well as access to Google Analytics for your profile and the ability to use your own domain name. The end result is snazzy, but I’m left wondering what I’m going to use it for.

I can see how Card.ly would be useful for some online professionals, especially those of you who have careers that depend on selling your social networking skills and personality.  How better to do that than to have all of the information from your Facebook account,  Twitter account, Digg account, Pandora account etc all listed in one place?

The only thing is that most people who have this much of an online presence already have personal websites. A personal website can show more information about you, still direct people to your  various social networking profiles, and gives you more design choices as well. For me, that’s preferable-as a writer, it gives me more space to explain how I work to potential clients and a better canvas to showcase my online portfolio.

Of course, I can use Card.ly to direct people to my personal website in addition to my various social networking portfolios-but I’d rather direct them to my website first instead of my Cardly URL. And once they’re on my website, why on earth would I want to direct them to Cardly to see all of my profiles instead of just linking to those profiles on my website?

The same thing goes for embedding a Card.ly button in emails-I already use a Firefox Extension called WiseStamp to put direct links to my Facebook and Twitter profiles in my email signature, as well as additional contact information.  It seems counterproductive to make people take another step (going to my Card.ly URL) to see all of this stuff.

Basically,this is a neat concept (although there are other apps like Nomee and retaggr that are somewhat similar in nature) with an awesome interface. However,  I’m not sold on its usefulness unless you simply don’t have the time, energy or knowledge to create a website on your own.

Feel free to disagree with me in the comments: TechCrunch does, so maybe I’m totally off-base and they deserve a higher rating. Let me know what you think!

Our Rating of Card.ly

Tags: Business

Categories:social