So, this is going to be somewhat of an unusual post for me.  I’m writing about someone else’s product, but I think it’s especially helpful for us in travel.

I’ve been in the travel and technology fields for 20 years. I spend much of my time traveling, going to meetings and tradeshows, just like all of you.  One challenge has always been what to do with the HUNDREDS of business cards I and my staff collect during every trip.  (Back-to-back shows could mean a thousand cards.) Luckily, many of the shows now offer badge scanners, but not all of them do for some reason.

So, after we bring the cards home, we enter them into Outlook, typing out each one. Then we export them to Salesforce.com.  After a while, this seemed to be such a pain, we bought a card scanner (that is linked to salesforce.com). That was about $250 and as it turns out, more trouble than it is worth. First you scan it. Then you have to correct the scan because they don’t all get read correctly (especially with the cool looking cards).  So, we’ve opted to go back to typing them… but that’s a big data entry cost when you consider staff time. So now we’re hiring interns to do the typing.  I’ve seen some people at other companies let the bulk of the collected cards sit on their desks. Stacks and stacks of them, waiting to be typed. Each stack with a sticky note on the top reminding them of what show they’re from. (Not the greatest sales people I would say).

Just yesterday, I heard about CloudContacts.com.  It’s simple; mail them your cards and they take them and do all the entry for you. CloudContacts allows you to access your contacts at any time online or you can import your business cards into many email applications and connect on most business social networks.  The fee is reasonable; $30 for up to 100 cards or $99 for up to 500 cards.  That’s twenty to thirty cents each, a couple of dimes. My time has to be worth more than that, right?  I think so. We’re going to try them this week.  See www.cloudcontacts.com