LinkedOut – Agile CRM Forced to Discontinue LinkedIn Integration

As strong believers in open source development and partnerships that stretch across economic lines, the team at Agile CRM was highly discouraged to receive this recent note from LinkedIn:

“We have reviewed your application and believe that your product violates LinkedIn’s API Terms of Use. In accordance with Section I.C, you are required to be accepted into a LinkedIn Partner Programs in order to use our APIs for applications that are used for hiring, marketing, or sales. For example, employee hiring, company marketing or monitoring, lead generation, relationship management, systematic matching of people with their LinkedIn profile, or anything with a similar feature or purpose. We appreciate your interest in using LinkedIn APIs.”

In a summary of the discontent among CRMs with LinkedIn’s oddly strict (and restrictive) API policies, ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan points out that LinkedIn has become much more aggressive recently in enforcing these policies, and that the business-social-media site appears to have suddenly restricted API implementation to only two “developer partners”: Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce – perhaps you’ve heard of them? 🙂

Unfortunately, we can confirm this reading of the situation. Only those two CRM bigwigs, whose pricing is way out of reach for most of our customers here at Agile CRM (and many of whose tools, in our view, are a tad too complicated for the average user), are now able to provide LinkedIn integration. As a result, we have no choice but to discontinue our LinkedIn integration at this time. If anything changes, our users will be the first to know! We are proud to have you in the Agile CRM family, and we will continue to work around the clock to help small and medium sized businesses sell and market like the Fortune 500, even – especially – when the stakes are stacked against us.

We are working on alternatives.

UPDATE: Many Agile CRM customers now use our Chrome Extension to clip contact info from LinkedIn and other social media sites for business. The free plugin lets you extract contact details from LinkedIn with just a click, then instantly start engaging, tracking and scoring those new leads.