After his guitar was broken on a United Air Lines flight and the airline rejected his damage claim, musician Dave Carroll made the YouTube video "United Breaks Guitars," which more than 8 million people have viewed. Carroll is far from alone in having employed social media to lambaste a company for poor customer service. For example, one popular blogger advised her million-plus followers on Twitter not to buy Maytag appliances. But the very technologies that empower customers can also empower employees, write Bernoff and Schadler, of Forrester Research. Companies can build a strategy around freeing employees to experiment with new technologies, make high-profile decisions on the fly, and effectively speak for the organization in public. Companies that feel hesitant to give their employees such freedom can benefit from what the authors call the HERO Compact-whereby management, IT, and HEROes (for "highly empowered and resourceful operatives") agree to work together to manage technological innovations. Management contracts to encourage innovation and manage risk, IT to support and scale employees' projects, and HEROes to innovate within a safe framework. Best Buy, Black & Decker, Vail Resorts, and Aflac are among the companies that have empowered their employees to take full advantage of social media. But it takes a while for corporate cultures to embrace this sort of innovation. In the meantime, managers can move forward on their own-building internal communities, looking outside the company for creative strategies, reviewing their hiring practices, and reaching out to customer-facing departments.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Thanks to a variety of online social applications -- including blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, user-generated content sites like YouTube and countless communities across the Web -- people are increasingly connecting with and drawing power from one other. In fact, customers are now beginning to define their own perspective on companies and brands, a view that's often at odds with the image a business wants to project. But organizations need not be on the defensive. Indeed, some savvy executives have already been turning this groundswell of customer power to their advantage. To investigate how, the authors interviewed managers and employees at over 100 companies that were rolling out social applications. From this research, they developed a strategic framework that businesses can use to implement social applications in a number of departments, including research and development, marketing, sales, customer support and operations.