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It’s one thing to suffer from information overload, but what about contact overload? Business cards collecting dust, incomplete contact records in Outlook, duplicate names in your mobile phone. Say goodbye to all that with this simple, yet effective unified contact strategy for the business person: digitize your business cards, import, merge and purge, automatically add email addresses replied to, then keep them in sync across all of your contact files. Here is what I do…

DIGITIZE YOUR BACKLOG of BUSINESS CARDS

Take that stack of cards and send them off to CloudContacts who will get them into digital contact files starting at $30 for 100 cards.

GET READY

1. Sign up for Plaxo Premium account for $60 per year
This will give you the ability to syncronize your Outlook, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, LinkedIn and AOL contact lists (Sorry, Plaxo doesn’t have a clean sync with Gmail). Plaxo will also enable deduplication of your contacts file.

2. For Outlook users, purchase and install Add Contacts for $15
This will let you automatically add email addresses to your Outlook Contacts file every time you hit “reply”.

3. For iPhone users, buy and install CardSnap Business App for $15 from iTunes App Store.
This handy tool will help you digitize your business cards as you get them. This assumes you have your iPhone contact file linked with Outlook or of the other mail services supported by Plaxo.

SETUP THE SYSTEM

1. Import CloudContacts contact files into Outlook
This is pretty simple…just login to CloudContacts, download the CSV and import into Outlook.

2. Install AddContacts and set it up
The setup for this is located in the Outlook Preferences tab. You can choose how you want it to behave.

3. Link up your accounts with Plaxo
Install the Outlook Addin from Plaxo and setup the synchronization for all of your various accounts within Plaxo.

4. Dedup the Contacts in Plaxo
Use Plaxo’s Deduplication tool to clean up your unified contact file, which Plaxo now has shared across all of your linked accounts. Once complete, the updates will save and populate to your linked accounts.

ONGOING MAINTENANCE

This is pretty much automatic for you with two exceptions: regular deduplication and importing new business card contacts.

1. Importing new business cards as you get them
Using CardSnap or CloudContacts import new business cards into your Outlook or iPhone contacts file.

2. Dedup your contacts regularly
Access the Plaxo Deduplication tool monthly or quarterly to keep your records and files clean and up to date.

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While business cards might seem a bit dated given all of the great things the internet offers, they still serve a purpose. And with that, you’re likely collecting a stack of cards you simply don’t have the time to enter into your address book.

For years, you could buy the CardScan “scanner” and OCR your cards, then import. But that was a hassle and time consuming. Of course, innovation triumphs and CloudContacts is to the rescue.

For a low cost, prepurchase the number of cards you want scanned. Ship em in. Within a matter of days, your contacts can be downloaded and imported into your address book.

I tested the service with about 300 cards I had accumulated. It was literally a matter of days before I could import the contact file. My use was simple – CSV to Outlook. But CloudContacts makes it easy to plug into various CRM solutions and social platforms too.

The newest feature is a visual of the cards you sent in – so you can confirm the information or view and scribbled notes. This is a good feature, since it doesn’t appear that you can get your cards back (they are recycled) – but why would you need them anyway.

I haven’t noticed any errors, so the quality appears to be quite high. The only drawback I experienced was the cards didn’t have a “scan” date, so when I sent additional cards, it wasn’t clear which were the new ones to download. All in all, this is a great service and probably has many practical uses.

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