How to Organise your Business Cards
Living in this country , we meet new people every week at networking, social or work events exchanging pleasantries and business cards. What do you do with your business cards? Do they lie in a pile in your desk drawer, filed in a business card holder randomly or scanned into an app like camcard?
There are many ways to deal with the cards you receive, but the most important thing to do with them is to organise them. When I receive a business card, I go through the following steps to give more value to the cards:
a. Note the date and event where I met the person.
b. State the industry or speciality that the person partakes in (vital when it is not clear from the business name or title).
c. Key personality traits - even if they are bad.d. Interesting facts about the person gathered from our conversation.If possible
I try to note the points as quickly as possible after I have met the person. Not so easy when you are standing and networking.I had previously shown how i had organised my business cards into an A4 file, organised by industries.This is great to pick up when you are at your desk, but what about when you are on the go, like I am constantly.Recently I started using Evernote Hello. This new application for your smartphone (not available on desktop as yet) has been created to help store business cards digitally to access them at any time. You can scan all of your cards within the 30 day free trial period, add notes on the person (as you wrote on the card), date you met them and link the person to their LinkedIn account. The details of the person on Linkedin are auto populated into their Evernote Hello profile. You can also link their Facebook account to their file which I choose to ignore as I feel Facebook is more for personal use. With one click you can add the person to your contact list as well, which I have done for certain individuals I have worked with.The beauty of storing my cards on Evernote Hello is that I have access to the details for my business or for referrals. The details also sync to Evernote on all my devices as well (including on my desktop). Using Evernote Hello is easy and intuitive. I am hoping that it will be available as a desktop app so you can add, amend and delete profiles more easily in future.
EDITOR NOTE - APRIL 2015 - Evernote Hello has been discontinued but Evernote has now incorporated the great parts of Hello into their main app. It's a win win situation!If you have too many business cards and do not know where to start organising them or do not have the time to do so, Decluttr Me has a new package for organising your business cards. To find out more information click here.
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