Yesterday, I was exhibiting all day at Solihull’s Business Growth Show. After speaking to people all day, many of whom were interested in my offerings, I ended up with a good handful of cards of people that I could easily work with in the future at any time. Now, I’m not one of these people that adds all and sundry onto a big mailing list and blanket emails everyone that I’ve ever met flogging my wares (Have already had that from a couple of people I briefly met) – I can’t stand that. I just maintain a smaller list of people that I have either worked with, or could work with in the future. I don’t ‘do’ blanket mails of any sort; what I’ll do is follow up this handful personally.

So, what to do? You have a load of business cards that need adding into your database, and really don’t want to do them individually. Well, (the immortal words), ‘there’s an app for that‘. For a long time I’ve been a massive fan of the ‘CamCard’ app; I even paid for the pro version cause I thought it was so good. Essentially, for the uninitiated, you take a picture of the business card, and CamCard would scan and interpret the details, and reproduce it in an editable form for you to manually tweak it if it got bits slightly wrong; then press a button to add the contact to your phone’s address book. I’ve used this setup for a couple of years and bar the odd few times when it struggles on a few cards and I’ve had to near as dammit enter the details manually in full, it’s been pretty good.

However, I tried today a new free app that LinkedIn have produced called CardMunch. But the difference with this app, is that it integrates brilliantly into LinkedIn’s database, so it will match the right person from the contact details, give you their full contact information to add to your address book, and also press another button to invite them to connect with you on LinkedIn too. Awesome little tool, I recommend it.