This week Mashable reviewed a new mobile app that enables you to create and send real postcards direct from your mobile phone. Postcard on the Run is a free app. When you launch it it gives you the option to create a postcard from existing photos in your phone’s photo library, to take a new one, or to use one from Facebook. You then enter in some text (up to 200 characters) and can sign your name using your finger so it appears hand written. You can then select addresses direct from your address book or add a new one (if you don’t have the person’s address stored in your address book, the app will email them to get it for you). You then pay for the postcard using a credit card and job done – they print it and post it to the recipient for you. It cost me £1.69 to create and send a postcard in the UK and I’m now waiting for it to arrive on my bloke’s door mat later this week (will report back on quality, etc when it does). (UPDATE: when I received the email receipt for this it said $1.69, not £1.69, which is a fair bit different. Although on the app it said £1.69, so I’ll let you all know the actual price that it worked out at when I get the bank statement in!)

I rather like this idea. The review and the marketing materials for the site focus very much on personal use of it – postcards from holidays, notes to friends and family, etc. However, I can see huge potential of this for marketing and professional networking. Let’s say, for example, you’re at a recruitment fair for your university or an open day. You can take photos of the guests that you chat with and send them a postcard to remind them of your conversation a few days later. You could have an image ready created to use on the front that includes a QR code or short url to send them directly to your university’s mobile site or prospectus app, or you could take a pic of them at your stand or with you (cheesy grins please!) and send that to them to remind them of the friendly person that they chatted with from the university. It could be a great way of adding that personal touch and combining the online and offline experience. For my own purposes, I can see this being rather powerful for use at networking events. When someone hands me their business card or comes to chat to me at the end of a talk, I can then following up not necessarily with an email, but with a little postcard to remind them who I am, where they met me and what we discussed. This could be a lot more memorable than just handing over my business card and having that gather dust on their shelf. I may well start doing this (I’m tempted not to publish this post and to keep the idea to myself too!). I see it as well worth the £1.69 investment per card.

Here’s a little slideshow of the steps involved in creating the postcard on the app. Mine is estimated to arrive at its destination in 3 days time.