During this past few days of Social Media Week, I like every one else bounced from panel to party, racking up the business cards and downing the Amstel Light. But just think how much fun it could have been if I was “high fouring” all these new people.
Welcome to the world of Poken. It’s my favorite innovation in social media and aside from being uber-cute I see huge possibilities in it for online networking. If you haven’t heard of it, Poken is a type of business card, modernized to meet current social networking needs.
Digital business cards inspired by social media
The tiny device swaps contact information by simply touching the four-fingered sensor with another Poken. It stores a user’s individual arrangement of personal and/or business information, plus links out to your choice of 30+ social networking sites. Don’t mix business with pleasure? Create multiple profiles corresponding with your diverse social needs.
After an event or a day of client meetings, plug Poken’s USB into your computer to review, remember and catalogue new contacts. Edit your Poken profile and design, or with one-click link you out to all of your social networks - you can even tweet right from your Poken page.
In the future, but hopefully not too far off, I would love to see Augmented Reality integrated with Poken via an application similar to TAT Augmented ID. Let's brainstorm for a moment future uses for mobilizing your social life…what would happen if you could plug Poken into your phone? The possibilities are endless!
Contact management and networking 2.0
Imagine walking through the events of Social Media Week, then taking a look through the lens of your camera phone and getting instantly connected and informed about your surroundings.
Get background information on speakers, update your status, or post your latest blog entry and invite the people around you to read. The best iteration of Poken would detect whether or not you'd gained a relevant new contact, help you prep with the highest level of convenience for conferences and workshops by reviewing speakers’ public information--and the kicker--it would help make forgetting so-and-so’s first name a snafu of the distant past.
Poken strikes my interest much more than similar options (such as the Facebook badge/widget, which you can embed anywhere), because it bridges the still common practice of trading business cards, with the current way of finding someone on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. after meeting in person.
The old and new types of "friending" are similar in that they both leave one person responsible for taking the relationship to the next level. Poken enables a new friending style; creating an equal playing field of people trading information simultaneously.
Poken saves us from pockets full of unused business cards--and lost leads. After all, we still live in a world where losing one of those tiny pieces of paper could mean the loss of the next major lead.
Monika Ratner is brand development manager at Big Fuel Communications.
