Is organization of your contacts in the cards for you? Is finding the right contact information at the right time a wild card? Watch this video to stack YOUR deck with strategies for keeping friends, family and acquaintances not only in order, but easily accessible. Following these tips will make your communication and networking more efficient, effective and productive- then you’ll hold all the aces!
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, and today’s Clutter Video Tip is about business cards. Now, you may prefer to keep these in their physical form, but today we’re going to talk about keeping them electronically and we’re going to go through the three phases of keeping this information – collecting it, entering it, and maintaining it.
So you come home from an event and you have business cards. They may be onesies or twosies, or you may have a stack of cards from one particular event. You need to have a place to put those until you have an opportunity to enter them into your system. I use a little basket here on my desk. When I can’t see the bottom of the basket anymore, that’s my cue to enter the cards. When I have onesies and twosies, I just make a little bit of notes on them and throw them into the basket, but if I have a group of cards from one event I gather them up with a paper clip and I put a post-it note on the front that has the name of the event. That way, if I need to access that prior to getting a chance to getting them into the system, I am able to grab that per event and quickly find that person’s name.
So you have them gathered up and ready to enter. There are many great ways to enter them nowadays with new tools that make it more efficient. We have a card scan machine in our office, that’s a great investment. If you have a large volume of cards to enter, this is a very accurate method. You can also edit and add to it as you’re doing the process. And it does keep an image of the card, so if you’re really into that visual of knowing someone’s logo or the colors on their card, card scan databases actually do have an image preserved. You can also use some apps for your smart phone. I have an Android phone and I use World Card. And there are many other apps for business card entry for I-phones and Androids. And that is also a very efficient way. It is a little slower than a card scan because you do them one at a time with the camera feature.
But overall either of these ways is better than the old fashioned way, which is typing it in yourself. And that still works great. You can do that in a batch. I recommend hiring a teenager to do that if you can. And just getting it all into your system and making sure that you clear out whatever gathering basket you have on a regular basis.
So you’ve got it all into your system and you really want to maintain that. I suggest that ongoing, whenever you spot something that needs a correction or updating, or even deleting from your database, stop right then and take care of it, because it’s harder to go back later and do it. If you do have an annual mailing that you do, like holiday cards or some kind of a sales mailing, it’s a wonderful opportunity to clean up your database then, get rid of duplicates, and make sure you have only exactly what you know you need in your database.
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See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for what to do with too many business cards or how to keep track of contacts.
Your video reminded me of a meeting I was at recently…….and of how old I’m getting.
It seems that young business people today don’t put much info on their business cards – just their Facebook and Twitter addresses. At the event, they just enter the info onto their phone and they’re done. I tried this, then I realized that no one “of a certain age” has their FB and Twitter addresses on their card!
I’m guessing it won’t be long until business cards date you – if you use them your old – kind of like wearing a watch has become. (Have you noticed that no young person wears a watch? They get the time from their phone. – in fact wearing a watch was listed in a recent article entitled “How To Tell If You’re Old.”)
Anyway – for the gargoyle – Riley. Don’t know why – it just seems right.