{"id":3218,"date":"2009-05-11T10:16:03","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T14:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=3218"},"modified":"2009-05-11T10:29:05","modified_gmt":"2009-05-11T14:29:05","slug":"google-promotes-profiles-with-free-business-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/11\/google-promotes-profiles-with-free-business-cards\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Promotes Profiles with Free Business Cards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google doesn&#8217;t frequently advertise their services or products in traditional venues very often. Apparently there are plans to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/external\/venturebeat\/2009\/05\/08\/08venturebeat-google-to-advertise-its-chrome-browser-on-tv-12208.html\">advertise Chrome on TV<\/a>\u00a0and they ran their <a href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/19\/goog411-rolls-out-bill-boards-in-the-hinterlands\/\">billboards for Goog-411<\/a> in out of the way places in September of 2007. In late April, Google\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/searchengineland.com\/google-profile-results-launched-17865\">introduced profile results<\/a>\u00a0that included personal profiles as a OneBox in the main Google search results. To promote this service Google offered up 25\u00a0free\u00a0business cards to the first 10,000 respondents\u00a0with profiles (thanks to Steve Hatcher of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.axemedia.com\">AxeMedia.com<\/a>). Mine came in the mail today:<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #0000ee; text-decoration: underline;\"><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-3219\" href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/11\/google-promotes-profiles-with-free-business-cards\/businesscard\/\"><\/a><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-3223\" href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/11\/google-promotes-profiles-with-free-business-cards\/bus-card2\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3223\" style=\"vertical-align: middle;\" title=\"bus-card2\" src=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/bus-card2.jpg\" alt=\"bus-card2\" width=\"400\" height=\"218\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/bus-card2.jpg 400w, https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/bus-card2-150x81.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Along with the free cards came a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iprint.com\/cgi-shl\/index.cgi?sID=2009051107\/f328c601d8bd1bff-1&amp;level=1060&amp;JS=ON\">promotion<\/a> from iprint to buy an additional 250 cards for $19.97. Ironically, this is an 18% premium over their current rate for full color cards that include address, phone, business name, etc. One would have to love Google an awful lot to buy a set of business cards that forces the user to the web to get critical contact information.\u00a0That being said, I am glad to get the cards for free as I stopped carrying business cards about the same time as I threw away my fax machine. These 25 should last me a very long time.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Another irony, from where I sit, is that it appears that my personal profile is more secure and less <a href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/21\/google-maps-upsurge-in-reports-of-map-hijackingsmerges\/\">vulnerable than a business listing in Maps<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google doesn&#8217;t frequently advertise their services or products in traditional venues very often. Apparently there are plans to advertise Chrome on TV\u00a0and they ran their billboards for Goog-411 in out of the way places in September of 2007. In late April, Google\u00a0introduced profile results\u00a0that included personal profiles as a OneBox in the main Google search &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-maps-google-local"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3218"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3227,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions\/3227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}