Locked out of LinkedIn: A Cautionary Tale of Account Management

Gather round, boys and girls, as ol’ Export Portal tells you a tale from the trenches. Pay close attention now, you just might learn something.

Once upon a time, Export Portal had an account on the respected business social platform, LinkedIn. It was a fine account, with around 8000 followers and 20,000 likes that we were very proud of. Since Export Portal is an international company, we thought it would be a good idea for representatives from both our US and Moldova offices to have access, each logging in as they needed.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn didn’t think it was such a good idea at all.

Believing the Export Portal account was either being hacked or just plain fraudulent, LinkedIn decided to lock the account, preventing either our US or Moldova office from gaining access. Now, this is an understandable mix-up, LinkedIn was just trying to be careful in an age of constant data breaches. However, there are times when precaution is taken too far, as Export Portal soon found out as we tried to recover our precious account.

If we were to regain access, LinkedIn required we submit legal identification and documentation of the account manager. But as we previously stated, this account was managed by different people in different countries, and one of them had since left the company. We tried submitting the IDs of the remaining admins, but wouldn’t you know it, that former employee’s information was the only one LinkedIn wanted.

We attempted several times to explain the situation, but for a social network meant to connect professionals, LinkedIn did a very poor job of getting us in touch with someone who could help resolve our issue.

We spoke to one support representative after another, each one listening to our story and insisting they couldn’t fix it but that maybe someone else could, recommending we just make a new account as they passed our case along. Export Portal is not a company of quitters, so we continued to pursue a representative who could help, we weren’t about to let that account we put so much work into just disappear. What’s more, various entrepreneurs we’d only barely had interactions with started claiming they were employees of ours while our account was down. We had to get our account up and running again to defend our name, otherwise there’d be no way to stem the tide of false associates inflating their hollow resumes with these false connections.

That being said, we did begin building new accounts during this time. After all, a good business is one that explores multiple solutions and makes best use of all results.

And indeed we did.

It took about 11 months, but the same stick-to-it-iveness that built Export Portal in the first place finally got our original account up and running again. And thanks to our exploration of alternative options, we were able to merge our original account with the new accounts we’d set up and started building in the interim, combining all our hard work into one big account we’re very proud to call our own.

Thank you to all our followers for sticking by us, and thank you to LinkedIn for helping us resolve the matter. We’ve learned a lot from this little fiasco, and we’ve started applying what we’ve learned to other aspects of our business to prevent similar issues from popping up. But while it’s always important to keep ourselves from making the same mistakes, it’s equally important to explore new solutions to stop these issues from happening at all.

Take blockchain, for example.

Decentralized ledger technology would allow international businesses to have approved people from around the world have admin access to the same accounts, while also enabling social media networks to better track the validity of those logging in to their website. Applications like this are just the tip of the iceberg, there are so many possibilities waiting to be discovered, and Export Portal is eager to start putting them to work.