, 44 million Americans have a side hustle. Some go hand-in-hand, like social media management and copywriting, while others wouldn’t exactly make sense together on a business card. Apps like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow us to show the nuances of both our professional ambitions and our personalities.
According to Carolyn Cox, director of Green Business HQ, in the US alone more than one billion business cards are printed each year. “Even with the most optimistic calculations on use of recycled paper that’s about 30,000 trees per year or about 500 hectares of forest,” she says. “If these were all printed on virgin — unrecycled paper — they could use up to 500,000 trees.” She notes that 88 percent of cards printed are thrown out within a week.
But there’s a difference between networking with someone else in your own age bracket, who is likely to be active on the same social platforms as you in much the same fashion that you are, and attempting to make a connection with someone much more senior than you. In those cases, it’s likely they’ll prefer the formality of an old school business card. But will the same thing be true in ten or 15 years, when we are the ones in the C Suite? It seems unlikely.