Fully agreed. I think much more value in people empowered to deliver value add messages, like the Zappos example you mentioned rather than “spamming campaigns”.

I just think it cannot be chaos.

Take the example of customer support, a company can empower its employees to help consumer and to engage in conversations. But this requires a lot of education on what to say to whom, when . Let’s imagine a Microsoft employee telling my mum how to patch her OS :-), this could be something !

I’ve finally picked up the pen and published my best practice suggestion:
http://www.180360720.no/?p=457

Excellent!

Absolutely agree that big companies can throw more people at something but I think there’s a real danger of it feeling too slick and too coordinated. I think it’s a turnoff to people because it feels manipulative all over again – rather than conversational and helpful. Of course it’s possible to do this well. Zappos has almost 500 employees Twittering but they aren’t part of a campaign, they care about their company and their company’s customers.

When you say … “doesn’t matter how much money you through”, I’m not so sure. It really depends on what you do with the money.

Imagine you’re a big brand about to launch a new product that is highly differentiated on customer pain point A and B. ( i.e you’ve done it the Seth Godin’s way).

You could build a strategy to make your points in social media and line up your PR, marketing teams along this objective.

This means figuring where your purple cows are hanging out in social media, capturing each and every conversation related to the pain point you just brilliantly solved and empower your people to collectively join the conversation and make yout company point.

Not thru “spam like” or irrelevant sales pitch but just participating to the conversations with strategic intent, metrics, listening to potential objections and learning along the process.

This makes a difference and the ability of Large companies to line up 10′s of highly skilled people to do that would make that difference.

One of the pb (which I think is a maturity pb) is that, as you said, many marketing teams have the mindset of influencing in one click, and they then leave it to few early adopters in their team (like R Scoble) to fill the void.

No wonder all the discussions about personal branding versus employer branding that we see growing these recent weeks.

By the way, what’s this rumor about the US adopting French as its official language ?