Rileyroxx, via Flickr (CC license) LinkedIn gets a thumbs down from Fons Tuinstra

Despite a long-term presence at LinkedIn, the social network for business, it has never given me a dream job, a client, or even a new contact that has been useful. Until not so long ago I blamed myself, since I did not ask many questions, did not actively seek contacts, and was a pretty passive user. So, when I got a chance to use my LinkedIn network of now 3,463,300 business contacts I dived in enthusiastically. That effort failed miserably.

I'm helping a China-based service company I joined earlier this year develop their business strategy. Some things work out, some things don't -- but in just five months, the company is operational. What proved fairly effective were our direct deals with about 10 Fortune-500 companies who are working in China. Because of our high success rate on that front, we decided to develop a strategy to get to the remaining 490. LinkedIn seemed the ideal tool.

I selected my first 30 target contacts on LinkedIn and started to write to my contacts and asked them to forward my requests to their contacts. It did not take very long before I got the first apologetic reactions and e-mails back from my closest network. They were phrased differently, but in most cases they did not or only marginally knew their "contacts" and felt uncomfortable forwarding my requests.

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A key piece of advice from social network experts -- and from most social networks themselves -- is that you should only add people you really know to your contact lists. This advice has only one weak point: users.

I have been reasonable careful about adding people, but that did not help me when I wanted to use my network. A large number of people, including many of my contacts, have so many "friends," that they cannot realistically know them personally.

Consequently, Linkedin and possibly also other networks are corrupted to a degree where they are actually useless for business purposes. That might be an important consideration for potential investors in such business-related networks.