Large public companies have been struggling with a variety of issues around social media. One of the more recent to come to light is more of a legal nature. Most employees sign agreements that anything they think of or work on during their employment belongs to the company. It’s typical “work for hire” contract language. But as we know, social media changes everything. So, if I blog or twitter as part of my job and I amass a large group of followers and then I leave my job - who do my followers belong to, me or the company? The company would argue that the followers belong to them and that the list of people is their IP, but what happens if the lawyers try to enforce that. Even a legitimate legal claim could backfire on them causing severe brand dilution.

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I often say that on the social web there are no experts - only experiments.  The fastest learner wins.

We are living through a sea change in business - Think about media with music, newspapers and publishing - or manufacturing with Flip (nearly two guys in a garage - design, manufacture in China, market online - then hit the big box stores and finally sell to Cisco for 1/2 billion) Astro Gaming (similar story without the buyout yet), and the new crowdsourced Crunchpad- think about the ubiquity of mobile devices and their rapid evolution or the rise of Twitter and the first chink in Google’s armor etc.

In these conditions the only lasting advantage a company has lies in its ability to adapt rapidly.

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