Sometimes we get asked a certain question enough times that it becomes obvious that we just need to have a blog post covering the subject. That’s exactly the case this week as our Customer Experience Manager David has pointed out to me. Apparently LinkedIn’s killing of CardMunch has left a lot of people wondering how to get their data out of LinkedIn and in to somewhere safe. For this example we’ll be importing the data to FullContact.

Export Contacts from CardMunch

LinkedIn’s official methods are less than ideal. The first suggestion is to export your contacts into Evernote. While Evernote is a great product, it simply doesn’t make sense as a contact manager. The second option, if you can call it that, is to go to LinkedIn, find your contacts, then sort them by tag. That’s pretty much a non-starter when you want to actually use contact data.

As you can see, LinkedIn’s lock-in  strikes again. It’s certainly not as easy to export your data as you might think. One could easily assume that you would just go click on a button to get a file with your CardMunch data. They would be wrong. Instead, you have to use an email form to contact LinkedIn. Oh, and you only have until July 11th of 2014 to complete this request.

Once you are emailed the link to your data, you will only have 24 hours to access it before the link becomes invalid.

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Import CardMunch to FullContact

The fortunate part of this equation is that importing your contacts is pretty painless. You see that CSV file that LinkedIn sent you? Just take it and add it as a new Source inside of FullContact. Here’s a quick GIF to show you how it’s done:

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Once you’ve imported those contacts, you can then add tags to them to make it easier to find them later. Of course, FullContact can also add in social profile data, find those contacts on other networks and then sync them to your mobile device too.

Dealing with the shutdown of a service that you use is never an easy task, but it doesn’t have to be painful. So export those contacts because your data should be yours, not locked in by whomever happens to be holding it.