What do you do with all of those business cards?

I’m always looking for ways to help my clients reduce clutter and one ongoing struggle is what do you do with all of those business cards that seem to stack up and never seem to be where you need them. In my post, I Have a 6th Sense, I discuss the use of a high end scanners made for reducing small paper clutter like receipts and business cards such as the  Fujitsu ScanSnap and the NeatDesk but if you don’t have an extra $400 laying around there is an alternative out there and it lies in the palm of your hand and yes, there’s an app for that!

In my search for clutter reducing tools I have discovered there are dozens of apps out there to scan your business cards and import them where ever you would like but they are not all created equal.  The best apps can read business card text and differentiate between names, titles and companies and fill the appropriate information into the fields in the electronic data collector of your choice. The most accurate app I have found is ScanBizCards.  Check it out http://scanbizcards.com/  Not only does it take a picture of the card and extracts the card’s information, you can then quickly send an intro email from the client, directly connect to them on LinkedIn, put it in your digital rolodex, add it to SalesForce and more directly from the app!  For $3.99, it’s a steal and it truly works well with very little edits to the text it extracts.  It will mis-identify text that is non-traditional but it’s a small price to pay for convenience and those instances are few and far between.  This is a great time saver for all you networkers, movers and shakers and those of us who would like to be!

It’s really a simple process but the hardest part might be choosing what to do with the information collected from the cards!  Next week I will discuss some options for organizing the information once you have it imported.  What’s the point of having all of this information if your not going to use it?

If you have solutions to help cut down on the paper clutter around you, share them with me.  I would love to hear what you are doing.