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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. Or use one of many apps for your iPhone or Droid to import new cards. The iPhone has many more options than the Droid and seem to work better.

GET READY

1. Sign up for Soocial ($39) or Plaxo ($60) per year
Depending on which service you choose, it will give you the ability to syncronize your Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, LinkedIn and AOL contact lists. Plaxo has scaled back their integrations considerably while newcomer Soocial supports many more and is cheaper. Both Plaxo and Soocial offer automatic deduping, but Plaxo does have a better tool to enable you to manage duplicates in a semi-automated fashion. Plaxo also offer many other bells and whistles.

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. CardSnap does not exist for Droid, but many other options exist.
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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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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For about $50 bucks a year, you get peace of mind. Setup is pretty simple – you download, install and select the folders you want to back up. The app is really small, so installation is quick. The program runs when you are not using your computer, so you really don’t notice that its doing its job – you almost wonder actually. But it does. And after the initial backup, it scans and updates and changes automatically. Resorting is cake – you open the app, find the version you want, and resurrect it where you want. I’ve done this multiple times and it is cake.

Perhaps most important, there are no storage size limits. I recall online backup services several years ago charging based on how much data you want to back up – the more data, the more expensive. But hard drive storage is so cheap now, the flat fee is all you need.

The biggest advantage Carbonite has over software based, local hard drive backups, is that in case your house or office goes up in flames, your backup data is still safe with Carbonite. Carbonite is remote, so your data is somewhere safe. With a local backup, its right there with your computer, in the line of fire.

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I recently switched from Fabulous to GoDaddy, because Fabulous being located in Australia, caused some banking issues. I did some research and found GoDaddy to be the best reviewed, lowest cost, no frills registrar. So I switched. However, what you won’t see until you switch, are some of the drawbacks with GoDaddy…

Cumbersome, Slow Site
You might notice this when you hit the site – lots of stuff going on. And it never ends. Once you get an account, the site is peppered with upsells, offers, more junk than you can shake a stick at. And there are so many options, it makes the site slow and confusing to navigate.

Complex, Confusing Purchase Process
Wow – tons of steps. And most of them “you might be interested in this”…”no thanks” pages. It might be good for them – selling more stuff. But bad for someone like me who knows exactly what I want. It adds to the process. And they really get you, because the the domain names are somewhat cheap, but the other upsells are not a bargain. Once you figure it out, buying is simple, just time consuming.

Fine Print
Here is where the power user will get annoyed. I like to move domains around, play with them, sell them, etc. You can’t do that at GoDaddy – we’ll, not without strings. For instance, you’ll find that changing certain domain settings will add a 90 day lock on your name – you can’t sell or transfer it if you want. And everything is setup to “auto renew”, so they get you when you don’t expect it.

All in all, if you are a casual domain buyer or just looking for a web site or two, GoDaddy might make it easy enough to justify. But for an advanced user, there have got to be better alternatives out there.

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