Since you never know where your next business lead will come from, it’s more important than ever to network online and offline. Using so many social media sites and attending so many networking events can have a way of making one feel fractured and pulled in too many different directions. This series will focus on how to better organize and focus your networking efforts.
The first place we’ll start is your desk. You know that stack of business cards you have stuffed in the drawer? How do you get those contacts onto your desktop where they can actually do you some good?
The do-it-yourself approach:
If you have an iPhone 3GS, you can use the Business Card Reader application by SHAPE Services.
Or you use the NeatReceipts NEAT Business Cards to scan all your business cards into your computer. It also installs a button in Outlook and ACT to scan directly into those files, if you use those programs.
If you can’t be bothered to scan in all your old business cards yourself, there are services that will do it for you.
The please-do-it-for-me approach:
Shoeboxed will scan, enter, and organize your business cards as well as those pesky receipts for expense reports and taxes. Then you view it all on your online account. You can import your contacts to Outlook, Address Book, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Gmail and other programs. And you can send your receipts to Quickbooks, Excel, PDF, Quicken, FreshBooks, Outright.com and Evernote.
Cloud Contacts will scan or transcribe your business cards, too. Then you can use their Web interface, to access your contacts from anywhere at anytime. You can import your contacts to your iPhone or BlackBerry, your email application, plus Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, SalesForce, Highrise, and Plaxo.
No matter how you tackle that stack of business cards, you’ll feel a whole lot better knowing you took the first step toward making the most of all those contacts you’ve met over the years. Because the best way to keep all those contacts together isn’t with a rubber band.
