A Flaw In My Logic...The LinkedIn Blackhole

Everyone always thinks that LinkedIn should and would have the most accurate and up-to-date information about your contacts, but that's not necessarily the case.

Whether you realize it or not, LinkedIn also gives you the ability to add custom details to each of your contacts.  This information will automatically get populated every time you import your address book, regardless of whether you are an existing, or potential new contact.  In other words, if your address book has wrong information, and you import that address book into LinkedIn, then your contact's details will get populated by incorrect data.  THEN, if you export your LinkedIn contacts and import them into another service, the wrong data will start to perpetually multiply making it unmanageable because it crosses too many sites.

Regretfully, if you make changes, or update the contact information in your address book, reimporting the contact into LinkedIn does not appear to clean up or modify the existing data, only adds to it.  This is a major flaw and one that I hope LinkedIn eventually works out.

In the meantime, I have to manually go through my 295 contacts and  wipe out all the editable contact information, by hand, for any connection made through LinkedIn so that I can start from scratch.

As you can imagine, this is an incredibly time-consuming process, but vitally necessary for anyone that wants to have a clean address book.

If anyone knows of a way to do a bulk clean up of this information, I am open to suggestions.

On an unrelated, but similar, note, if you have installed the LinkedIn Social Connector Plug-in for Outlook, DO NOT copy the contacts into your Outlook address book.

1. It will not merge the contacts, that will have to be done manually.
2. If your contact has a vanity LinkedIN URL, it will not be imported.

I hope this helps all of you keep your address books clean and organized.