No I’m not talking about turning those stacks of business cards into real life “let’s go to the park and play catch” friends. That’s silly. Who has time for more friends anyway when we have things like Twitter?
No I’m talking about taking all those business cards you collect at conferences and mixers and turning them into new friends and followers across social media sites.
Let’s face it, you can’t possibly do business with everyone you meet at these events. You can however connect online and share those ever important status updates with these folks. Who knows, maybe down the line you can turn those tweets about what you had for lunch into a big business deal.
Here’s how it’s done in a few simple steps.
- Dealing with dead tree data: The first problem of course is that business cards are not friendable. In fact they are very analog. You can’t put them in your computer or easily import them into, well, anything. Until now that is thanks to CloudContacts. They’ll take your stacks of cards and turn them into something even prettier, structured data you can use and in our case, abuse.
- Exporting: Once CloudContacts receives your order they process the batch and notify you via email when the job is done. From there you can login to their website and grab your data in several different formats. They offer specific formats for sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and more general purpose .CSV formats. Worst case you can also dump this data directly into Gmail which is compatible with our next step on just about every social media website.Protip: Setup a new Gmail address to use for these types of data import/export jobs, that way your main account doesn’t get unnecessarily bloated
- Importing: Finally it’s time to match up those once lifeless squares of paper with their online counterparts. Just about any social service will give you the option to “Invite Your Friends!”. Locate this section and simply point it to your data file or loaded Gmail address book and fire away! The invite application searches it’s own records for a match and starts the connection process.
Here’s a look behind the scenes at CloudContacts. Notice all the export options along the left side.
(click to enlarge)
January 10th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
I’ve heard about cloud contacts. Sounds like it’s valuable but it’s pretty expensive.
Wondering if there are any good apps to do something like this yourself. Seems like an opportunity. Perhaps Evernote would be a good option. Take pictures of all of your business cards, and have it organize all the text for you.
David
Community Manager, Scribnia.com
January 10th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
David,
I think the price is fair for what you are getting. I’m going to add a shot of the backend system.
There are lots of self serve systems and scanners but this is all about not having to touch a thing.
January 12th, 2010 at 7:39 am
It is probably cheaper to invest $100 in some sort of business card scanner. They used to be pretty clunky and awkward to use, but nowadays the software is relatively good and allows you to export in a number of different formats. It even keeps the graphic image of the card, just in case you want to remember some especially egregious designs. I wonder when will be the next iPhone app to do the same thing — imaging that? You just make a picture of the business card and it would enter it in your contacts. All it takes is some good OCR software (or service).
January 13th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
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January 24th, 2010 at 7:42 am
I enjoyed reading this
January 26th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
What a clever little thing that CloudContacts is. Thanks for sharing your tips on how to actually make use of those business cards which are more often than not just lying around on the desk or stacked away.
February 4th, 2010 at 7:47 am
I have a lot of reservation about how it can decipher the information and put it in the right fields. I have a lot of business cards from overseas, and they are of all fonts, and styles. But I was pleasantly surprised by CARDSCAN abilility to process the information and put it in the right fields. We may have to tweak here and there, but it is much better than typing in everything yourself. I highly recommend it.
February 9th, 2010 at 11:57 pm
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