At my company, a large professional services firm that relies on referral marketing, we implemented some of the advice that Linda offers (particularly #1-3), and we won at least one deal, with more deals still in our pipeline.

We simply asked all of our professionals in our New England office to 1) open a LinkedIn account and 2) add specific keywords that related to our business. We got 11 leads within just a couple of weeks! Not mind-boggling, but more than expected for a free service, too.

Our firm also has two “groups” that Linda talks about, and since firms like ours have a reasonable amount of turnover, it’s a great way to stay in touch with our corporate alumni, which also brings in deals (though admittedly difficult to track actual numbers).

I think most people venturing into ways to use social media for business are very experimental, but my firm asked me to put it into my marketing plan for next year, so the bold and adventurous aren’t being shy about it. Linda may not have the answers you were seeking, but she’s definitely on the right track. Most businesses are too afraid of LinkedIn to even realize the business potential, leaving most of the opportunity to firms willing to be more creative in their approach.

The 60 Second Marketer recently did a webinar on Social Media (soon to be available on the site). In it, we discussed the Gartner Hype Cycle which says all new technologies go through a period of “inflated expectations” before they settle into a “plateau of productivity.”

Social Media is definitely in the “inflated expectations” mode, but that’s not to say that it’s not going to end-up being a highly-effective tool. Marketers just need to figure out how to work with it and measure the results.

It seems you’ve joined the legions of “experts” who offer guidance on how to spend a lot of time with social networks like LinkedIn. As in your case, this guidance usually arrives without a scintilla of evidence that LinkedIn isn’t a total waste of time and money.

Rather than telling us how to use LinkedIn (to do things that may be more effectively done with other web tools), you might consider describing actual valuable results that came from using it. Who has gotten those results? What were they?

I strongly suspect that such results are scant. Why? Because there is an ordinary term for people who are two or more “connections” distant from oneself: “strangers.”

Just because you know somebody who knows somebody, doesn’t make anybody your connection. But it may make you presumptuous if you try to use the idea.