Is it my impression, or did LinkedIn improve their services by creating a contact management system that looks and smells like a CRM?

In the recent year, we’ve seen Facebook become the number 1 social media site that started to creep into the Corporate world. Facebook can now connect to Salesforce.com via AppExchange or Appirio.

But it appears that LinkedIn may be your only source for a low-cost no-cost single-user CRM package. And it fits into the Saas cloud computing model.

If you go to your connections, and choose View & edit details >>, you get a pop-up window that resembles a CRM.

Other than the usual fields that come with connecting to antother person (Name, Title, Company, and Email) the rest can be filled in by yourself:

• Phone
• IM
• Address
• Website
• Birthday
• Other Info
• Notes

It’s the last two fields that caused my alarm bells to ring. In Other info, the pull-down choices are:

• spouse
• anniversary
• manager
• assistant
• custom – where it is a custom defined field

Notes is anything you want it to be.

My next question is when you initially import your database from Outlook, which fields can (or should) be ported over? I certainly don’t want to go into my hundreds of contacts and manually enter all this pertinent info.

A nice sync tool with an Outlook plug-in would be my Christmas wish list. And, of course, synced to my Blackberry!

By the way, you can connect to me on LinkedIn here.