The business card nobody carries anymore

A printed card used to do three jobs at once: it proved you were worth remembering, it gave the other person something physical to act on later, and it signalled, by the act of handing it over, that you actually meant the exchange. None of that disappeared when the card stopped being the default — it just scattered across a QR code on a badge, a LinkedIn request sent from a phone, and whatever you can type into someone else's app before the conversation moves on. The job is the same. The tool just stopped being singular, which means you now have to choose one on purpose instead of reaching for the one thing in your pocket.

What the exchange was always actually for

The useful way to think about any of these methods is to separate what they carry from what they're for. A phone number or an email address is the easy part — almost every option gets that right. What a printed card did better than people usually credit was force a small pause: you had to decide, in the moment, that this particular conversation was worth the physical gesture. A tap of two phones or a scanned badge QR code can carry the same information with none of that friction, which is an improvement for volume and a real loss for signal. If you want the gesture to still mean something, the deliberate pause has to come from somewhere else — usually from what you say while you're doing it, not from the method itself.

The badge QR code is convenient and says nothing about intent

Most large conferences now print a personal QR code on the badge itself, and scanning someone else's is faster than any card exchange ever was. It's a different transaction than the one a company's booth scanner runs at the entrance to an exhibit hall — this one is peer to peer, and what it hands over is usually just what you typed at registration, nothing more. The convenience is real, but speed is exactly what makes it forgettable: a scan that took two seconds leaves no memory of the two seconds, and by the fourth or fifth one that day, the names start running together. If you're going to rely on it, pair the scan with something that isn't automatic — a sentence typed into your own notes app before you walk away.

Sending the request while you can still explain it

A LinkedIn connection request sent three days later, cold, with no note attached, asks the other person to reconstruct a conversation from a name and a face they may only half remember. The same request sent within the hour, with one line — what session you were both in, what you were talking about, what you said you'd follow up on — does the remembering for them. That single line is doing the job the card used to do just by being handed over in person: it proves the exchange was specific, not a volume play. It costs you ten extra seconds of typing and changes whether the request gets accepted at all.

The note that no method writes for you

Whichever way the contact information travels, it arrives without the part that actually mattered — why you wanted it. A card went into a jacket pocket and the reason went with it only as far as your memory held out, which for most people is a day, maybe two, in a week full of other conversations. The fix is the same regardless of method: a short note, written the same day, naming the person, the thread of the conversation, and whatever you said you'd send or ask about. The same discipline that makes conference notes worth keeping applies here — the contact is cheap to capture; the context is the only part that decays.

None of this requires picking one method and using it exclusively. It requires noticing, at the moment of exchange, that you're choosing one — and writing down, before the day ends, the one thing none of them will remember for you.