What all of these companies should be doing with social media is inviting customers to tell them what they really love and hate about the company, and ask them how to move forward. 

Customers are incredibly smart and remarkably creative. Trust them! They can create a far better marketing message than you can. Let them do it.

And some companies are doing just that, with remarkable results. Here are a few examples:

Netflix Prize is offering $1 million to anyone who can come up with a way to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.

Netflix Prize
 

Lego Mindstorms is a line of Lego sets combining programmable bricks with electric motors and sensors, gears, axles, beams, et cetera, for building robots.

They have created a strong community of professionals and hobbyists of all ages involved in the sharing of designs, programming techniques and other ideas associated with Lego Mindstorms. The line is also sold and used as an educational tool, originally through a partnership between Lego and the MIT Media Laboratory.