Business Insight Zone

I’ve faced down a few stacks of collected business cards like that one in my time, and a friend asked me to talk about this subject, so I thought I’d share my process here.

1. Collect information at the event. Business cards are still useful, in their way. So is a pocket notebook to jot things down while you’re talking to a new person — including their basic contact information, if they’ve run out of cards. Since I’m a heavy Twitter user and often have a smartphone with me, I’ll follow a new acquaintance on Twitter right then and there if it’s appropriate.
2. When you get home, clear your desk and clear some time for following up.
3. On the newly-cleared expanse of my desk, I spread out the cards from the conference in neat rows. Something about doing this helps me to focus on each card individually, while keeping in mind how many follow-ups I have to do in the allotted time.
4. If I’ve collected a ton of cards, the law of averages suggests that there may be a few from folks I already know or (rarely) don’t care to know better. For speed’s sake, I sweep through the entire grid of cards on my desk and pull out all of these discards (dis-cards?) at once. I keep them in case I need to consult them later, but I file them away in a big plastic binder of a type that Kevin Kelly recommended a few years ago on Cool Tools. I don’t alphabetize the cards or anything — I just tuck each card into the next available slot. (The few times I’ve needed to go back to this binder for reference, it’s been easy enough to find the right card based on the mass of cards around it from people I met at the same time.)
5. Optional step for those as obsessive enslaved to instant gratification orderly as me: tidy the remaining cards into fewer rows. You’ll feel a nice little rush of instant productivity
6. I trawl through my social networks looking for the people whose information is on the remaining cards. I may follow them on Twitter, request to be a contact on LinkedIn, (rarely) request to be Facebook friends, add their blog’s RSS feed to my reader, or any combination of these. Typically I just open up all of these networks at once in a tabbed browser and rotate through them as I handle one person at a time across all networks.
7. After I’ve located a given person on each relevant network, I write them an e-mail or make some other sort of contact via social media. Easiest of all are the people who specifically asked for follow-up on some business issue: you write them an e-mail, remind them of your conversation, and let them know that you’re also following them on Twitter (or wherever) to make it easy to stay in touch. (This would also be a good time to make an entry in your CRM, if it’s relevant.) But even if there’s no immediate business reason to connect, you can comment on one of their blog posts or Flickr pictures, respond to one of their tweets, or, if you can do it sincerely, broadcast a tweet recommending them to your friends, like this: “Met @JohnDoe at the XYZ conference this weekend. Super-nice guy, a pro’s pro in project management, well worth following.” They won’t soon forget that.
8. Finally, you file away each card as you’re done with it. One of my favorite aspects of my process here is that it’s so easy to see your progress as the grid of cards on your desk shrinks and shrinks. (I told you I like instant gratification.)
9. Extra credit: set yourself a reminder to follow up with your favorites from the conference at intervals after the inital contact — say 10 days, 25 days, and 45 days. Don’t make it a mechanical exercise; use it as an opportunity to remember why you liked them the first time, and then really re-connect about something that’s important to you both.

Now, over to you: what do YOU do to follow up with the people you meet at a conference?

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Photo by J Aaron Farr.