Monetizing LinkedIn

So everyone is on FB and MS and Twiter and a host of other smaller social sites, but is anyone getting heavy into LinkedIn?
I was thinking at lunch today about how many offline social networks have been prodding members to "recommend" each other on LinkedIn and was thinking that with control of a domain name, it wouldn't be all that hard to come up with fake people/accounts that do nothing more than give our recommendations. Somehow,this has to have an application that could be monetized on.
Does anyone have any thoughts/opinions/ideas on this? (other than making a tool/service to create accounts)

LinkedIn is a different beast than FB, MS, Twitter, etc.

To monetize LinkedIn you have to offer a value to a group of very savvy individuals. Random spamming of products will *not* work.

LinkedIn, IMO, is best suited for software/hardware sales, staffing, conferences and/or creating a reputation as an expert in a particualr field.

Another thing which can be done is to mine LinkedIn for trend, company, product, etc. information. Creating useful groups would help in establishing the gathering of said information.

I advise against random sapmming -- no one will link to you and you'll be banned quickly.

How about any ideas on getting groups going? If there was a way to get groups formed around a marketing idea, this would be a seemingly easy way to monetize linkedin.

The key to monetizing LinkedIn is understanding the user demographic.

In short the vast majority of LinkedIn are, in the words of LinkedIn:

A premium audience of 35M+ professionals with an average household income of $109,000

Click to expand...

In addition the majority are college educated, have more than 5 years of work experience and are at least 28 years of age. The network is mostly professional persons who want to connect with other professional people.

If you want to create a group then you will have to create a group which caters not only to the demographic, but also the mindset of the users when they come to the site.

Unless you are selling something of value in a corporate setting (staffing, software, process efficiencies, etc.) then your group will be small and/or you will get banned.

LinkedIn *can* work, but the marketing strategy needs to be thought out and executed within the scope of the *feel* of the LinkedIn site.

I was invited to join LinkedIn before but I didn't.
Now I got to find that email again

i'm re-openign this one.
i do staffing, so linkedin is applicable to me. i've started a few groups which are growing slowly. i'm being totally WH about this as its my day job.
I've also watched some others on there and found that there are a number of "open networkers", or people looking to just expand their connection lists. they build up lists, and then post updates leading back to their sites. its really no different than twitter methods, but it seems that you have to be much more related to the users to be successful.