I meet a lot of people every month and I continue to spend a lot of time entering contact information in to Outlook. There are a host of ways to make this easier for yourself and for the other people you meet. Below are some of the things that I have been doing.
- Use a vCard – Attached a vCard to your email signature to make it easy for others to add your contact information to their account. I find it slightly annoying to see these come in as attachments in my Outlook so I created my vCard, copied it to my website and just added a link to my signature. Works great.
- Add your LinkedIn Profile – Add a link by your signature to your LinkedIn profile. Most people do a search in LinkedIn for you so why not make it easier and faster. One a side note, in LinkedIn you can edit your link and make it more user friendly.
- Use Google Goggles – With your Android device, you can use the app Google Goggles to take a picture of a business card and the program will recognize that it is a business card and transcribe the text in to a Contact. Mixed results, but when it works it saves time over manually creating a contact.
- Use Gwabbit – This application works with Outlook and lets you capture email signatures and create Outlook contacts with just a couple of clicks. http://www.gwabbit.com
