5 Tips: Efficiently Communicating Your New Contact Data
A few months ago I received a message from someone I once met. He had moved from one company to another and wanted to let me (and the 400 other recipients in the To: field) know his new contact details. I opened the message and included was a 1.2 megabyte JPG with his new contact details, in an image.
Can you imagine how inconvenient that is? Ever since then I have been paying special attention to how people communicate their new addresses and have now decided to write a ‘How to’ about the subject.
So, are you planning on moving to another company? Changing your email address? Phone-number? Feel the need to send your friends and acquaintances a personal note about this upcoming change? Here are my 5 tips to do it efficiently:
1: get a Plaxo account.
Plaxo works very simple. You enter your details there and so do lots of other people (15+ million). Now instead of changing your contact data everywhere you only change it online and everybody who is connected to you via Plaxo also gets your new contact data. It is a great system and I look forward to they day they have 5 billion customers and my address-book will always be up to date. Unfortunately some people really dislike Plaxo which brings me to tip 2.
2: get a temporary Plaxo account.
Even if you don’t like Plaxo many other people do. And it is by far the easiest way to change your data in a lot of your contacts addressbooks. Simply get an account, enter your correct data. Keep it like that for a week or so and then log out again. No need to stay connected to Plaxo all the time.
3: Don’t send raw data
Even if you send me your new contact data as text in a message I still have to copy page each line to my AddressBook. That is way to inconvenient. Please use the excellent vCard format. See next tip.
4: Send a vCard
vCards are simple XML files with your contact data in it. Most applications can read this format straight out of the box. If I get a vCard attached to an email message I simply double-click it and it is opened and added to my AddressBook:
You can generate a vCard in most applications simply by selecting your own record and selecting ‘Export’ and then choosing the vCard format. But if that is too difficult for you you can also generate your own vCard: http://vcardmaker.wackomenace.co.uk/
5: Upload a vCard
Not everybody can receive attachements. Some Firewalls or mailservers strip away any message they don’t recognize. Upload your vCard to a server and supply the url. Here is mine (Right click and choose ‘Save link as…’ to download).
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9 Responses to “5 Tips: Efficiently Communicating Your New Contact Data”
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Hey Boris,
There is an error in the link to your vCard.
Cheers
DG
Hi Dennis, added download instructions. Can you try it one more time?
in retrospect to these five excellent tips on ‘digiquette’ I have to say the currently US only (+ invite only) GrandCentral (http://grandcentral.com) is promising.
With GC you only have 1 telephonenumber for everybody. Based upon the callers number one of your phones will ring (phone at home, private mobile, work phone, etc). Whenever you change jobs you can just “forward” your old contacts to your new, in this examples’, phone at work. But there are way more features GC has to offer.
@ Boris,
Yes, link is working now.
DG
huhuh I see my name..
tip 6: in your vcard, use a working adress instead of
http\://www.fleck.com
Hi Janneke, if you open the vCard in a text editor you see that extra slash but if you add that vCard to your addressbook it should read just fine. Just tested it on my Mac and that works just fine. Can someone confirm this for me on Windows?
Yes Raimo, you are in there and a happy Plaxo user! See anyone else you know?
@roelantp Everybody I’ve heard on Grandcentral was really negative about it. I even believe that there were some posts on techcrunch about how disappointing it was (and how promising it sounds).
What I always do when somebody dares to send an email with 100+ addresses in the TO or CC fields is a reply to all with something like: “Hi …., thanks for the interesting information. Did you know I have a new number? it’s 06 4200 4200″
Working like a charm :)