I don’t know about you, but following up, on almost anything, is exhausting and time consuming. When I returned from the IAEM show last week, I came back with a fist full of business cards from all the interesting people I met. There’s more than 100 of them - I’ve spent the entire week taking my time to write them back, one at a time. I’ve barely made a dent.

Does it surprise anyone that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of trade show leads NEVER get followed up properly? Does it surprise you that many of the responses I have gotten from the booths I visited are impersonal, boilerplate responses that often don’t even apply to me? It doesn’t surprise me. Heck, it doesn’t even bother me as much - at least they’re trying.

Two years ago when I was transitioning the focus of the system from dating to events, I made one critical observation. In the dating arena, the feature matrix we highlighted focused on privacy - we knew this mattered from some field research I did ;). However, when you move into the business arena, while the motivations map to the same core value, the needs do not. When we’re busy swapping cards in hallways, we’re more concerned with efficiency. I care more so about making sure I reach out to everyone I met. I don’t want to be a robot, but in some ways, it’s a better foundation than the current reigning model - do nothing.

I’m in the process of moving out of my apartment (sad indeed). I’ve started collecting all the business cards of people I’ve met into a shoebox. It’s brimming full. I glossed over lots of them. I can remember quite a few, but I don’t remember most. For me, this is a big problem.

Fortunately, this event served as a wake-up call. One of the original design goals of the syncPEOPLE system was to make it easier to exchange information. We’ve built in all the hooks already. Something in my gut tells me we need to put this out sooner than later - it’s just too important.

How do you manage the clutter? Are you bombarded with business cards from others? Will you help us test this new system out?