If you go to a trade show or convention, you’ll come home with a large stack of business cards and a lot of good intentions about what you’ll do with them.
Or go to some networking event, again you come home with lots of business cards.
You might be really lucky and have an assistant you can assign to enter those cards into your contact manager. But more and more, as organizations flatten, you don’t have that luxury.
What to do with that mountain of business cards, and no time to type them in (if you can type)? Get an inexpensive, easy to use business card scanner, such as the CardScan Executive I use (http://www.cardscan.com).
These specialized scanners are about the size of a deck of cards and attach to your computer via USB, which also powers them.
Specialized optical character recognition software (OCR) can convert the scanned images into text.
Then the magic happens. Since most business cards follow a relatively standard format, and/or many fields on the card can be readily identified (e.g. telephone numbers, email addresses, etc), the software can automatically put the right information into the right fields.
And they can then automatically put that information, and the card image, into your favorite contact management software (e.g. Outlook) for ready access when you want to make contact.
Over the years I have collected thousands of business cards. If I didn’t have a way to get them organized, they’d be just that much scrap paper.
Take all that information and give it to CardScan.com or Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com), and they can help keep that information up to date as your contacts change jobs and/or move around.
And after you get the contact information in your computer, you can use your business card collection to prop up that shaky table.
