What do YOU do with Business Cards?
by Shane on 23/11/07 at 10:48 am
4 comments
Fred has a HUGE business card collection!
We once worked in the same studio and I often used to go through his cards for design ideas. I secretly admired his collection – clearly this man knew over a billion people! It was like going through a hunters trophy cabinet, the evidence of numerous fruitful networking opportunities displayed for all to see. Respek to Fred!
I was inspired back then, and have since started my own collection – it’s sitting on my desk right now and I’m wondering how to best manage it.
Some people capture all the details into outlook and then throw the card away. This sounds like a great idea, but if you forget the contacts name and the company name it becomes a bit of a challenge to find the details! I rely on visual memory – I can go through all my cards and tell you where and when I received each one. Tagging would be a great option, but not sure if the new Outlook does this?
Any ideas anyone?
Shane Dryden is the 'Maven' at Ideate. The driving-force of Yuppiechef, Shane loves to write on advertising and innovation. He spots the non-obvious stuff behind the obvious, which seems obvious, but isn’t really that obvious (obviously). View more articles by Shane.
Schalk
Nov 23rd, 2007
If you have a decent cameraphone you can use ScanR http://www.scanr.com/. You take a photo of the business card and email or MMS it from the phone to bc@scanr.com and it is then emailed back to me in VCF format (which I then import into Outlook and sync with my phone’s email contacts) or in PDF format (which my phone can also view). The nice thing about ScanR is that its free and I don’t need to keep a backup of my contacts or the original cards because you can view all pics you sent to them on your account on their website. The downside is that you need a decent camera on your phone and a data connection to upload it but neither is much of a problem these days
Fred
Nov 23rd, 2007
Thanks dude, although my collection is a little messy right now. I would also suggest scanning, and until reading Schalk’s comment, I didn’t know what to do with the cupboard full of cards I got. Cheers Schalk!
Shane
Nov 23rd, 2007
Thanks Schalk, ScanR sounds like a great option! I’ll give it a test. I wonder what’s in it for them, hopefully they’re not going to spam my contacts?
Lantz
Nov 23rd, 2007
Howzit Shane
I had this problem, and think I have solved it, I found these see through sleeves the size of a a4, that can hold 10 cards and 20 if you put them back to back, then you put the sleeve in a file, and you can just buy more sleeves as it grows. My kids had a field day putting the cards into them so i don’t have any order at this stage. I found them at mackro.