The Network Unbound

Social media is far from being all cupcakes for business, however. In expressing and funneling the ever-changing will of the people, it remains a fiercely independent and mutating beast. Chevrolet's foray into user-generated marketing backfired in March because it misread its audience and lost control over its own campaign. Chevy offered up a Web contest to create an ad for the Tahoe, but the entries that got passed around, blogged about, and eventually covered in the mainstream media were all about the SUV's abysmal gas mileage and melting polar ice caps.

The average person's opinion becomes even scarier to companies (and governments) when someone starts aggregating those opinions and targeting them for maximum impact. It was no accident that a political protest was one of the first real-world demonstrations of social networks' power. Activists adopted these new technologies early on because the tools mesh perfectly with the goal of connecting and empowering individuals. "Those of us in online activism have been thinking about these issues for years," says Alexandra Samuel, head of Vancouver, British Columbia-based startup Social Signal. "Suddenly the tech world and the business world are interested in collaborating and building communities." Samuel wrote her 2004 poli-sci dissertation at Harvard on "hactivists" who use legal and illegal means online to do things such as protest international trade agreements; her startup builds and grows customized online communities. And while her first clients were all nonprofits and government agencies, now she's getting approached by businesses, including Canada's largest credit union. "The name of the game now is to engage the user in creating value," she says.

"We're honestly at the very very beginning of this," says Vision Critical's Smith, of the use of social networks. "This community concept is just going to grow and expand." That expansion will be driven not just by the technology but also by the various causes of the people who use it. The new Web, after all, lets us create value just by doing what comes naturally: speaking up.

Anya Kamenetz is the author of Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006). She lives in New York.