"Participatory media must be understood not as a technology phenomenon but a social phenomenon." -- The Economist, April 2006

Social media is allowing marketers to reach a highly engaged, enthusiastic population. But perhaps the most interesting element is that social media allows -- and demands -- all of us to be marketers. All online users are contributing to the wealth of information being used for social marketing. Sometimes this participation is passive; by simply performing a Google search, we are contributing to organic search results and listing certain domains higher than others. Other times, participation is active. For example, Facebook has more than 120 million active users worldwide, and every day hundreds of thousands of people make edits to Wikipedia.

Marketers are learning and experimenting with social media tools and techniques to enable personal recommendations and personalized attention -- the holy grails of marketing and customer service. The following examples represent a mix of complexity in terms of how companies -- from well-known corporations to nonprofit organizations -- are leveraging social media.