How do you manage your contacts / rolodex?

[Ankesh]

Hello Sowpubbers:

I am reading "Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty" by Harvey Mackay. Excellent book. Especially for people like me who find networking hard.

The book is choke full of good tips and advice. But it doesn't have good suggestions on how to maintain a book / file of contacts.

So - if you have a system of maintaining a rolodex file - can you share it with us? What softwares do you use to file the info? What things about every contact do you store besides name / phone / address / email? How do you keep in touch with folks? Do you publish a newsletter / send out postcards etc?

Any tips and suggestions you share would be appreciated!

Hi Ankesh,

A while back I started using DabbleDB -- it's not a Contact Management system, but is instead a relational database system you use to keep track of all sorts of information for personal use.

I've tried a lot of other systems in the past, but didn't really find one that let me keep track of meetings, associate people with companies, and various other things I wanted to track.

(I should point out I haven't tried any of the downloadable software options, as I wanted something I could definitely access online.)

So with DabbleDB I've got a system where I can set up new companies, associate people with those companies, set up new meetings + meeting summaries and associate those with people.

This lets me do things like look up a company and see my list of contacts associated with that company, along with when the last meeting was. I find this is particularly handy if you deal with a large number of people and are prone to forget when you last met with them was.

The only downside to DabbleDB is that it can sometimes be a bit slow to load.

Before using DabbleDB, I was using a similar system using Salesforce, but quickly dropped it when I came across DabbleDB due to the huge cost associated with Salesforce (particularly since I was only using it as a contact manager...).

Hope that helps!

- Thomas.

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by Ankesh

So - if you have a system of maintaining a rolodex file - can you share it with us? What softwares do you use to file the info? What things about every contact do you store besides name / phone / address / email? How do you keep in touch with folks? Do you publish a newsletter / send out postcards etc?

Hi Ankesh,

I think my system is too primitive... and I might try out something new and different in the upcoming future...

Nevertheless...

I just use Excel! Across the top I have different columns, with headings like...

Name (of the contact person). Of course, this is the person's name.

Last contact (R=regular contact). I try to keep track of when I last was in contact with someone. People who I am in contact regularly (e.g. daily or weekly), I just put "R". The idea with tracking this is I can see when I last was in contact with someone, and can see when I should get back in touch. (I got the idea from my brother Thomas, who as you can see from his email, has a more sophisticated system which I will probably try out myself too. ) Admittedly, I'm not as good as updating this column as I should be...

Email 1, Email 2, Email 3. 3 columns for different email addresses. If I only have one email address, I leave the next two columns blank.

Phone. Their phone number(s).

Group. I have abbreviations for different groups people are in, and people can be in more than one group. For example, "F" = "Family" - this means my relatives. "A" = "Amigo" (i.e. "friend" in Spanish) - people who are social friends. I use the "A" for "Amigo" instead of "F" for "Friend" because "F" was already taken for "Family". "B" = "Business" - that is, a business contact. "P" = "Physics" - that is, people who I know from my past as a physicist. Of course, people can be in multiple categories, then I just use two letters, separated by a comma.

Notes. These are additional notes I may add. For example, notes about their family (like their spouse's name, for example), their website(s), where I know them from or who I met them through, their profession or business details, and generally any more details I know about which seem useful or relevant.

Anyway, it's quite primitive, and it's about time I did better. But I thought I'd share it in case it helps give you ideas...

Best wishes,

Dien

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Phil

Hello...
I think you can manage your contacts offline as well as online by social networking sites.
Or sending sms to friends....