I read a networking book from the eighties the other day (it was second hand, and I was bored).
I had a good chuckle at the old lingo, and the cutting-edge suggestions.
One thing it placed huge emphasis on is having and maintaining a rolodex.
I have never seen one in real life, and I imagine that they have been moved to computers by now.
What programs do people use now?
Microsoft Outlook.
Every e-mail “contact” I have has space for phone numbers and address’.
I still maintain a business card holder - not quite a rolodex, but I don’t really need every business contact in my Outlook contacts, which is where I keep the rest of them.
Plus, sometimes it’s a PITA to copy all of that information into your Outlook contacts when you maybe only use them once or twice a year.
A lot of email programs can maintain an address book with complete contact info (not just email addresses). MS Outlook is one example.
My iPhone.
My blackberry, which syncs with my MS Outlook several times an hour. Also, many people now send out virtual business cards attached to thier emails, so there is no need to retype things.
Google. My Gmail contacts (both personal and my Google Apps account at work) are available to me anywhere, and sync immediately and automatically to my Android phone where they are available at any time and place. For each user it stores names, addresses, several phone numbers, several email addresses, their picture (if they use a photo for their Google or Facebook profile), and any other notes I want to put in their contact “card.” I can even scan a business card with my phone camera and have all of its information OCR’d and entered into my contact list automatically. Way better than a rolodex.
My iPhone, with google contacts.
My main contact database is in Outlook.
Outlook, Blackberry, LinkedIn, Facebook.
I still maintain a rolodex. It has come in handy during power failures, phone crashes, etc.
If I get a business card, it goes into the rolodex. If I email someone or call them more than a couple of times, they end up in my Outlook contacts list. There are a number of business contacts that I’ve made, where it isn’t worth the time and effort to transfer the info into Outlook, but I want to have it around someplace.
In my office, we use a combination of:
(a) Books of physical business cards;
(b) Spreadsheets;
© Personal address books in Lotus Notes or other applications; and
(d) A company-wide database of client, prospect, and competitor contact information.
I use a palm pilot. Kind of usefull for backing up my contacts as I can have it on multiple computers as well as the palm itself.
Seems like outdated technology in this day and age.
My cell phone. It has space for phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, webpages, etc. I don’t memorize numbers like I used to, haven’t needed to.
The last three places I worked at still use rolodexes.
You guys actually type in contact info? Nowadays, the cool kids havebusiness card scanners. These are also handy for scanning receipts.
Yeah, ditto.
And I went to the bank yesterday and had to speak to one of the branch reps and noticed she had a GIANT rolodex on her desk, old-style. So they’re still around.
FileMaker. I built it in FileMaker 2 and it’s been converted & improved upon as time ticked on.
In sales and marketing, people might use customer-relationship management software, like GoldMine or Salesforce.com. These programs usually include a feature to let you store contact info, and also help with managing communications with the prospects.
I have seen a lot of these. In the last few offices I worked at I have set them up for people. The manager usually keeps an online record and then throws the business card into some sort of file system as well