Business cards, now what?

You know that big stack of business cards you collected after that last conference? Yea, that stack over there, collecting dust, on the corner of your desk.  You know there were several good prospects, right? There was also a woman who said she might know somebody that could use your services. But you never followed up with them. You haven't connected with them on any social space either. Before moving forward, however, follow this advice on how to sort those cards.

Have no fear

How are you going to tackle that stack and start building relationships? If you have an iPhone you can start using CardMunch. What the heck is CardMunch? It's a nifty app from LinkedIn that takes a photo of the business cards you collected, sends them in for transcription (from the folks at Mechanical Turk) and adds it to your contacts. Perfect!

What's the catch? There isn't one! Not unless you count actually following up and making connections a catch. Occasionally you may need to go in and tweak the entry. For the most part, however, the entries are 100% correct.

Make it personal

The best part about CardMunch is its ability to give you an immediate opportunity to connect with these people. You can send a quick follow up email, add people to your iPhone contacts, and even send LinkedIn request. Why are these touch points important?  Because you want to be able to help these people. That's why you collected their business card in the first place right?

But before you start slinging friend request and follow up emails make sure you get into the CardMunch "guts" and start tweaking the outgoing messages. You don't want to to just read "I'd like to connect with you on LinkedIn." but instead something like "It was a pleasure meeting you and I'd like to connect with you here." You don't want to dump a totally canned message on these folks. Better yet, customize the request to the event you just attended. "It was a pleasure meeting you at #IMS11 this year and I hope we can connect here." is personal and shows you care to customize the message a bit.

Practice what you preach

If you're requesting people connect with you on LinkedIn make sure your LinkedIn profile is decent. How do you do that? Follow Chris Brogan's advice on making your LinkedIn profile really work. In the meantime I have some business card to scan!