Get in more people’s address books with ContactMonkey

Ever notice how some people have these elaborate email signatures that reveal every possible way to contact them — including the very email address they’re using to correspond with you? There’s a reason for that: they want to make it easy for you to add them to your address book. Having all that information, neatly organized, basically screams, “ADD ME!” Additionally, there are a number of programs that automatically scrape emails and add the information to your address book. If you want to make it easy for people to add you to their address books, but don’t want that elaborate signature, a service called ContactMonkey might work for you. While the service contains many features, it boils down to this. When you sign up for ContactMonkey, you get a URL that points to your contact information. The users can then add you, from whatever device they’re currently using. It takes just a few clicks, and it requires little to no typing. That makes it more convenient than other methods. The best part, at least for BlackBerry users, is that the service appears to have been built with BlackBerry in mind. If you click a ContactMonkey link from your BlackBerry inbox, you need to click just one button to add the contact to your address book. On the other hand, iOS users have to enter their email addresses. ContactMonkey will then send the clickable link to that email address. That seems complicated, and with a growing number of iOS users it might be a big obstacle. But that should be ironed out in due time. (And remember, that’s still an issue for BlackBerry users, because the point is to use ContactMonkey to get people to add you to their address books. Chances are you deal with plenty of iOS users.) If they click the link from a PC, they’ll go to the ContactMonkey website, which gives them options for adding you. Again, this might not be the most convenient, because after they click the link they have to supply the information for their mobile device. But it’s still a better bet than merely hoping that they’ll manually add your information. The days of emailing vCards are over. We need to find new ways to make it easy for others to add us to their address books. ContactMonkey is nothing if not a good start. It has its flaws, but it works better than most services I’ve seen. For individuals, it’s free. Just head to ContactMonkey.com and sign up for your free personal account. And let me know how it’s working for you. Via CrackBerry.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.