Social Network Contacts and Followers - Like a Bag of Marbles?

A friend said something to me over the weekend that struck a cord. He said, "I've got all these LinkedIn contacts but I've never gotten anything from them." I thought it was interesting that he felt if he collected a bunch of contacts, a miraculous event would occur. I replied to his comment with, "contacts are not like marbles; you don't collect them for collecting's sake. You need to collect contacts so that you can leverage them to glean information from them." Social networking applications are ripe with sub-applications such as Quick-Polls, Surveys and Online Presentations; all with the ability to have your contacts participate and comment. Use these applications to help you gather information to assist you with on-the-job research and other business knowledge. In other words, make sure you play with your marbles.