Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
I am hoping that an address book will help me keep up with all the names and facts, but, then I see people who have dones this for years without PDA 'helpers'. Honestly, I am convinced that between the two of them, RCJordan and Laisha know everyone in the entire world.
How do you remember all the names and information? And what do you do to keep the contacts 'fresh' so those contacts will remember you? More importantly, how do you expand that network of people you know?
With ACT!, I have the option of sychronizing with various PDA's. So, if I were to use one again (a PDA), its just a simple sync and I've got it all including to dos, calls and meetings.
I did the Palm thing right when they first came out. Loved the concept but just couldn't deal with Graffiti nor the stylus and tapping keys one at a time. I even went as far as to purchase the modem and tried that a few times. Took me 10 minutes to send a 2 paragraph fax. Wasn't for me.
Today's PDA's are far more advanced than that first Palm was. But, you still have a very small workspace and the only advantage I see to having one are the contact management features and the ability to send and receive e-mail anywhere, at anytime. You've seen the commercial...
Can you still hear me? Good. (3 seconds later), Can you still hear me? Good. (3 seconds later), Can you still hear me? Good.
I'm hearing more and more about BlackBerry's these days!
I am referring to any contact made at any time. This may or may not be somoene you know well enough just to 'hang out' with, but someone you have done business with in the past. A professional contact.
How about "Happy Holiday" cards? I used to do that with my lawn-care business in high school. It was a great way to put a little reminder in front of past customers about 2 months before the grass started growing.
If the contact is from a website and you notice a redesign or changes on their pages, send them a quick "nice work" e-mail.
What I'm still doing... as I said, not well... is to keep track of contacts' interests and to send material that might be useful. Email is a great tool for this, and over the years has replaced the telephone and US Mail. I send SEO and web contacts message about subjects of common professional interst - things like IE browser vulnerabilities (that's kept me busy ;)). If I know the contact more personally and our interests overlap, I may send out a message about a great art exhibit I've seen that I think they'd like too. It does help to know your contact.
The Google April Fools pigeon rank page got a bunch of responses. Curiously, I've noticed that jokes... really good jokes, sent sparingly... elicit more responses from business contacts than straightforward notes asking how business is. At the same time, I feel, you need to be very cautious about adding to the clutter in someone's mailbox, and some people don't like forwarded emails at all.
About making new contacts, that's even harder. In the San Francisco Bay Area, there are a number of professional organizations, including one very good multimedia group in Marin whose meetings I regularly attend. I've given a few SEO presentations to organizations that have expanded my horizons, but the way the climate is right now, these may result in nothing more than people emailing you offering to buy you lunch if you'll give them some free advice.
My approach is work intensive and not easily scaled up to an extremely large group of people, and I'm beginning to find managing email and changes in contact info to be a daunting task too. A universal address book and really good and secure contact management software would help. I have very mixed feelings about Act... maybe I'm not using it well... and I've grown pretty retro about gadgets like PDAs. I always carry two ball point pens and an extra piece of paper.
There are two Contact Managers that dominate the U.S. Marketplace; ACT! and GoldMine. I have a few clients who use GoldMine and they swear by it. I also have a few who use ACT! and they swear by it. I guess it all comes down to features and which program you feel comfortable with.
For everyday contact management with a simple to use and completely configurable interface, ACT! and GoldMine are heads above the rest. Outlook tried at one point to compete with ACT! but with the malicious security holes, it never gained any ground. Those who are not in the know are probably using it for managing their contacts and it does a fairly decent job. Wait until they unleash a virus and all those users in their address book seek revenge!
Tracker is by no means perfect, and maybe Act is just as friendly when you know it. Be careful... if you convince me it's good, I may have lots more questions. ;)
I found Goldmine to be a nightmare, but can recommend "Goldmine for Dummies" as an awfully good book on figuring it out.
Back on topic, and perhaps related to maintaining a network of contacts, as I was just exiting my time tracking software I was presented with a pithy quote:
"Few people do business well who do nothing else." - Lord Chesterton
...These days, I do feel like I'm doing nothing else... clearly a bad sign.
Maximizer used to be a big competitor of ACT!, though I'm not sure of the program's status now. One key differentiating feature used to be that ACT! sees individual people as the basis for its database, while Maximizer was more organization oriented. Hence, if you had 9 contacts at a company, Maximizer was better at sharing info between them (e.g., company name & address) while ACT! thought of them as 9 unique contacts. I think the newest versions of ACT! are a little better at the grouping thing (I've been using an old version.)
ACT has always had cool interfacing. A while back, I set it up to pull caller ID off a phone with an RS-232 port, and ACT! would pop up the record for the caller's number if it was in the database. Not too useful for a variety of reasons, but definitely cool from a geek standpoint.
Yep, Tracker was and still is the Best! Rogerd hit the nail on the head with the multiple contacts per company thing. The really usefull thing about Tracker was being able to load multiple datases at once and switch between them. Great if you are working on different product lines. Also keyword tagging and searching and, well the list goes on.
They were working on a totally new design and a 4 dimensional database approach to enable centralise data wharehousing which would have taken the market by storm. Trouble was people got wind of the new work being done and stopped buying the current product in anticipation. No income, massive R&D costs, bye bye Tracker.
They were bought by Maximizer who "Maximized" the product into Tracker 97. However, that version was so unusable I refused to use it when we were upgraded by the company I was working for and went back to Tracker 2. That is still the best version, only is has Y2K problems. Not sure what happened to Maximizer the company.
Tried Act! 4 but couldn't get my head around the "only one contact per company" thing.
Having said that, life is simpler these days so I am just using the database that comes with the Palm.
Mind you, when I write a contacts database for people I always have Tracker in mind as the model. Maybe I am set in my Tracker ways...
Getting back OnT, as G says, the biggest challenge is not keeping track, but keeping in touch. I find using the database to store some personal info such as birthday, spouses name, etc invaluable. It is amazing what a difference it can make if you simply ask after the spouse by name. Or s simple, "Say hullo to spouse for me" at the end of a call/email. A cheesy birthday greeting can do wonders. Or a phone call or email for no reason at all other than to say "hullo".
The trick is keeping in touch. Use you imagination.
Onya
Woz
