What Should I Do With the Business Cards I Receive?

March 20th, 2009, 23 Comments »

One of my (many) failures as a professional is my utter lack of a contact management system. I handle my contacts through Gmail’s search feature. So, if we haven’t received or sent an email, you are dead to me. I don’t defend this approach, it’s just the one I ended up with.

Let’s go upstream a little, though, and talk about what I do with business cards. Because that’s really what I’m getting at–what do I do when I receive contact information for a human I’ve recently met? Currently, it works like this:

  1. Do I want something from them, or is there some kind of action item associated with our conversation (”I’ll send you that article”, “here’s that plumber I mentioned”, and so forth)? I act on that more or less immediately, sending them an email so that they’re in my de facto CRM system.
  2. Do they want something from me? I wait for them to email me.
  3. If neither #1 or #2 apply, their card sits in a stack on my desk for a while. And then it usually gets thrown away.

Here’s what I should probably do: when I receive new business cards, immediately enter them into some kind of system which enables me to categorize, tag and annotate their contact details (”Met this dude at SXSW, does graphic design work for bands”). Maybe Apple’s Address Book software is satisfactory for this? I don’t want to use LinkedIn for this, because I don’t want to rely on somebody else to take action. Nor do I want to spam them with invites should they be disinclined to use the tool. After all, it’s my CRM problem, not ours.

But there’s a more fundamental question at play: why bother capturing contact details for people where there isn’t an immediate, obvious reason to do so (as in #1 or #2 above)? I already know more than enough web designers. Yet I meet new ones every month. Should I enter them all into my CRM system? There are exceptions, of course. We met a guy from Lonely Planet at SXSW. While I can’t say what use that connection might be today, I can imagine that it might be useful in the unknown future. Maybe I just need to be selective about who makes the CRM cut?

What do you use with the business cards you receive? And how do you manage your contacts?

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A Colleague is Seeking a PHP Developer for a Project

March 3rd, 2009, No Comments »

A colleague who runs an online business is looking for a developer for a project. Here’s the brief, admittedly vague spec:

Our site is programmed in PHP and we use MySQL for our database. We currently have an inhouse developed shopping cart which uses two payment gateways, one that tracks credit card info for recurring members and one that processes the payments. The one that processes the payments now offers a service that tracks recurring, making the former redundant. So we are looking for a programmer that can implement the transition from one gateway to the other.

If you’re interested, send me an email at darren at darrenbarefoot dot com. I’ll forward the email on to my colleague, and he’ll get back to you if the’s interested. I really must get that Jobs page up and running on this site.

Note to future searchers who find this page: Please note the date on this post. If it’s later than April 1, 2009, it’s too late, so please don’t email me.

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