Automating Sharing Contact Information
Sharing contact information.
Twitter is a great place to meet people fast. So how do you keep track of the people you meet and the opportunities that develop? I have been researching, testing and playing with CRM tools (Customer Relationship Management) to help companies track contact data. Before you can manage the information, you need to share it. There are two pieces of contact sharing you want to think about:
- Publishing your information for others to be able to reach you, and
- Collecting information from others to enter into your contact list.
Collecting information from others
For the tech challenged, the tried and true method of typing works, but is time consuming. There are those that graduate to cut and paste, but this too is time consuming. Fortunately there are smarter ways of sharing our information and collecting others.
Vcards and Hcards
Vcards are a tool that allows you to store your contact information in a format that is easily exchanged. (Wikipedia on Vcards with link.)They are the digital equivalents of business cards. Vcards can be imported into programs like Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc. Vcards save the recipient the time of manually entering all your contact information and insures its accuracy. Vcards can automatically be attached to the email you send from Programs like Outlook and Thunderbird.
Hcards are basically coding on a websites that is readable both by human beings and machines.
You can add Hcards to your website and HTML emails, or attach vcards to your emails. Both are good ways of allowing others to easily add you to their contacts.
Ideas for collecting information from others
From Email
If someone sends you an email with an attachment, there is chance that they have attached a Vcard. You can easily add more than just their email address.
From Websites
You can drag and drop a little script from Technorati to your favorites. If you are on a web page that contains contact information that has been coded as an Hcard, you can click on the script and it will read the infomation and prepare it for saving in your contact list. THe Script grabs the info and converts it to a Vcard for importing into your contact list.
Using Vcards With Other Programs
Salesforce. com Does not allow the importing of Vcards. As a work around, If you use Outlook and the sync feature between outlook and salesforce you can enter the information into your database.
Gmail only imports CSV files. You can convert your Vcard to CSV then import into Gmail.
Thunderbird is an open spource email program from Mozilla- I love open source. Thunderbird supports vCards.
To create (or edit) your vCard, go to Tools > Account Settings, select your email account, and click on the Edit vCard button.
Thunderbird can automatically attach your vCard to every email you send. To automatically include your vCard in outgoing emails, simply check the Attach my vCard to messages checkbox.
Further tools and Information
Below are a few tools to help convert files back and forth.
Online Vcard Generator - This is a neat little tool that will create a vcard for you.
CSV ( coma Separated Value to Vcard tool )
Vcard (Vcard to CSV tool)
Hcard http://microformats.org/wiki/vcard Tools to help generate hcard or add info to you html to identify existing information as hcard
Adding a Vcard download to your Wordpress site.
I have added a little script to my tool bar that allows me to grab Contact information for a page that contains the Hcard. The one thing that I dont like about is that if there is no Hcard present, It will create a blank one instead of notifying you that there is no contact info formated on the page.