A corporate business card on the phone

Salespeople in the 1980s and 1990s looked for opportunities in the Yellow Pages, and companies advertised there too. As the internet spread, online directories gradually replaced the printed ones — Jack Ma’s China Pages, founded in 1995, is the best-known example. Search engines then took over: with Google and Baidu everywhere, companies built their own portals to introduce the business and its products and to publish company news. The portal became a company’s window on the online world, and in the mobile era companies rushed to build mobile versions of their sites.

An employee at a social event wants to explain what the company does, or introduce one product. Could they simply push the mobile site to the person in front of them? Technically yes — but is it convenient, and will the customer remember the address? Tencent’s Q1 2019 results put WeChat’s monthly active users at 1.1 billion; Douyin’s 2019 data report put its daily active users above 400 million. With that many people using the two apps every day in China, would it not be easier to publish the company profile and product information on WeChat and Douyin, create a corporate business card, and have employees forward it directly at a social event — and at the same time use two high-traffic platforms to spread company information and build wider recognition?

Picture this: Xiao Wang, a sales manager, is at a dinner on Friday night. Introductions are brief and polite, everyone adds each other on WeChat, the toasts begin, and by the end of the night everyone goes home. The next day he looks at a dozen or so new contacts and cannot place a single face. Now suppose the company had an official WeChat mini program: after exchanging WeChat, Xiao Wang simply forwards the mini program. The next morning his dinner companions open WeChat, see what he sent, tap it and browse the company’s products. Among them, Mr Zhang — also at that dinner — finds exactly the product he has been looking for, and forwards the page to his friend Mr Zhao. Skip ten thousand words: Xiao Wang ends the quarter as sales champion.

If you are on the front line of marketing, or you run the company, would you not want a card like Xiao Wang’s? Good news: starting from the six-degrees idea and working through the resources around me, I went through six people to get the mini-program code for that company card. Pick up your phone, scan it with WeChat, and see the products for yourself.