Like many people, I was not quick to join LinkedIn. As a matter of fact one of my friends invited me and it took me 2 months to accept his invitation and join. What I thought was “not another time wasting black whole of a social network”. When I finally joined the network I added people from my outlook and found that several of them where already on the network, a total of 30. I thought, “Cool, I know some people here” so I added them to my network on LinkedIn. After that I joined 4 different groups that where of interest to me including one on venture capital, one on marketing, another for book authors and the last one on keynote speaking.

Now I was on LinkedIn and had my 30 connections, my 4 groups and I thought I was done. Then I asked myself: “What next?” I already know the 30 people I added to the network I don’t need them to contact them. So what’s the value of this? What’s the difference between this and Facebook, or MySpace, or Hi5? What’s the buzz on LinkedIn?  Can you use Linkedin for marketing?

For months I did nothing, thinking this was a place to socialize with people you already know. One day I was looking on Google the keywords “Venture Capital” as I was advising one of my customers get some funding. I then visited LinkedIn and logged in. Then I did a search on Venture Capital once more. Wow, 50,000 + came up. Quickly I noticed that these where not just company names, I was getting the name and many times email and phone number of actual people, with photo, title, interests, hobbies, all what you would wish for.

The downside of my Venture Capital search is that none of them where connected to me directly so I could not contact them as in LinkedIn it is considered Spam. It is now clear that LinkedIn is the best social network for sales. Imagine if of these 50,000 I could have a few hundred connected to me directly. One of the things we can do is call people and ask them for their advice. I could email them and see if they are interested in my project or ask them to point me in the right direction. Now the task was connecting to them and network.

I found a handful of third level connections in my search. This means that I know someone that knows someone that knew lot’s of people in Venture Capital. This one contact was my friend Tony. My friend is an engineer and one of his clients is a Venture Capitalist. That one person connected me with 300 people at a third level. If I really wanted to speak with one of those 300 people I could ask Gustavo for an introduction through his customer; but that was not my idea, I did not want just one connection, I wanted hundreds, or thousands.

I played more with the software and did more targeted searches by clicking on “Advanced Search”. I searched by zip code to see the closest contacts to me and therefore the ones I could contact in person. Some other words I searched included “energy drinks” and “bottled water”. For every search I got great contacts. I thought this could turn out to be my very own private rolodex.

Jorge Olson is an author, speaker and entrepreneur.  You can find his latest book on self promotion and marketing “The Unselfish Guide to Self Promotion” on Amazon.com  You can read more about how to use social media and social networking from his books and blogs.