You should consider importing the contacts from these networks into your main address book app. We use these services to connect with people, update our statuses and play with whatever features they contain, but we don’t always remember that these resources have contacts that belong in our primary address book.

Another consideration is having a secondary resource for backing up your primary address book. With most services able to import and export files as a CSV or vCard file, it has turned into a fairly easy process. For the least tedious approach, try to find a secondary resource that you can keep in sync with your primary resource — for example, Plaxo can sync your address book with Mac OS X, Yahoo!, Google and several other apps. Otherwise, you’ll have to import and export your contacts on a regular basis.

After selecting the apps for your primary and secondary sources, here are the steps to take to make sure that you have all your contacts in primary resource and backing it up to the secondary resource.

1. Determine what kind of files your address books can import and export.
2. Export address books from your social networks into a comma-separated (.cvs) or vCard (.vcf) file based on Step 1. Remember where you save the files.
3. Import the addresses books from Step 2 into your primary resource. Repeat until you’ve put all of your contacts into your primary address resource.
4. Sync your primary and secondary resources. If they don’t have a sync wizard, go to Step 5. If they have a sync wizard, make sure you synchronize them on a scheduled basis if it’s not automated. You’re done.
5. Export the address book from your primary resource into a comma-separated (.cvs) or vCard (.vcf) file.
6. Import the primary resource file into your secondary address book as your backup. Repeat on a scheduled basis, unless you find a way to automate it.

You might want to consider a solution that can sync with your phone — if that’s not already your primary source. That’s what I like about Google Contacts and Calendar — they sync with my favorite PC app, I can access them anywhere and they also sync with my phone. Read our contact management and application articles for ideas and apps to consider.

How do you manage all of your contacts?

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CloudContacts, a startup aiming to make the information stranded on business cards more accessible, added a new service to its offering this week.

While they may seem archaic, business cards are still the de facto way of sharing contact information. After attending a conference or event I usually have quite a few of them tucked away in my pockets. Extracting that information accurately into my contact manager after the event, however, is a real chore. CloudContacts already offers a pretty innovative service that involves mailing in those business cards you have cluttering up your desk. CloudContacts enters the data on the cards to its online contact management service, which then allows you to export the information to your email app, CRM system or contact manager.

The new service enables you to submit your cards via email. You simply take a snap of the business card with the camera on your phone, email it to the service (via a unique email address generated for your account, similar to the way that TwitPic works) and the information on the card is extracted added to your CloudContacts contact manager.

I tried the system out with a couple of cards and it worked well. Getting a decent snap of one of the cards with my iPhone’s camera proved pretty difficult as it had a small font and a low-contrast combination of black text on a blue background. I managed to get an OK picture but thought that it might cause some problems for CloudContacts as the text was very hard to read in the photo. Not so — CloudContacts captured all of the information from the card perfectly, which was impressive.

A contact's details page

A third card, one of those tiny MOO mini-cards that are popular with folks working on the web, proved impossible to photograph properly with my iPhone’s camera; the text was simply too small.

The CloudContacts contact management app is straightforward, though it has a couple of nice frills including automatically pulling in a Google Map and Twitter widget (if a Twitter username is present) into your contacts’ details pages. It makes it easy to export your contact data into a number of different file formats for import to your favorite email app or contacts manager.

Pricing starts at $4.95 per month for up to 20 cards. For large quantities of cards, it would be less hassle to use the CloudContacts mail-in service; CloudContacts view email subscription as a good way to “top up” your card contacts, rather than a way to input lots of cards.

CloudContacts pitches this service as more accurate and less hassle than business card scanning hardware. Having never used a business card scanner, I can’t attest to that, but with business card scanners costing upwards of $150, the pricing is reasonable.

How do you get business card data into your contacts manager?

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ContactHero

Riffing off a recent post by Imran Ali, “Soocial: The Best Address Book You’ll Ever Use?,” I thought I’d put in my impressions about another contact management service – ContactHero. ContactHero is looking to be your most favorite and most used contact manager, aggregating all of your important contacts into a single place and making them easier to edit and organize them.

You can import contacts from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo!, among others, and includes an API to integrate ContactHero into your existing contact management systems.

You can sort contacts by first or last name, company name or most recently added. ContactHero gives you the option to populate fields if you are entering contact information for several people from the same company. There is also a co-worker link so you can toggle through contact listings you’ve entered for any contact’s colleagues.

ContactHero also includes a call reminder feature and you can receive a daily digest of reminders of the calls you have to make via email. Use their drag and drop calendar feature to manage your call schedule. And you can access a calendar view of all scheduled calls.

You can schedule emails to go out to your contacts and post-date them for future delivery. You can share contacts as text or VCard attachments. You can also export and download all of your contact data to standard formats such as CSV, XML, or vCards.

Search functionality not only includes first and last name or company name but you can assign tags to individual contacts as well to make the search more intuitive for you. I like this feature. I personally search my contacts by first name, but I also often forget someone I met at a conference and all my brain can muster is “that new social networks for women business owners.” If I tag that contact “social network” or “women business owners,” I’d be able to drill down to find the contact I need.

More Frills

As I dig deeper into applications these days, compatibility and functionality on my iPhone is key. ContactHero actually has a finger-friendly interface for mobile devices, and it doesn’t require an application download.

Some other bells and whistles include maps for each contact or group of contacts and icons to identify your contacts. Or upload a photo or several photos to any contact. Click on a contact, and you get a popup window with more details rather than being led away from your contact list. Close that window and the contact list is still there. Click to dial a contact straight from the ContactHero interface or click to email them directly.

ContactHero knows the value of tracking call history. You can link a contact to a call, add notes to contact records, and even attach messages to the contact. I tend to take notes during phone calls in a spiral notebook (yes, incredible but true), and it can be tedious flipping through handwritten pages to find notes from previous calls. I really need to upgrade my call management system and how.

One thing ContactHero isn’t trying to do – at least not right now – is merge social networking functionality with contact management ala Plaxo. They seem to be sticking to anticipating all of your contact management and contact communications needs from a practical standpoint.

ContactHero does cost money. Pricing is pay-as-you-go at $9.99 per month, and they offer a 30-day free trial before committing to their product.

Do you pay for a contact management system right now? If not, what would it take to convince you to pay for one?

-images from ContactHero.com

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