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Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Today, wikis are a common tool for young workers Patrick Fraser/Corbis Outline

Kerry Miller's blog, Passive Aggressive Notes, has become a sensation Mark Stanton

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. The social network is now partly owned by Microsoft Markham Johnson

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Still, we have to talk with a few corporate honchos. How are they dealing with this outbreak of communication tools? J.P. Rangaswami is a good person to start with. He runs technology at BT (BT), the British telecom giant, and is famous for an approach that blends inside and outside networks. We leave a message with the press department. A day passes. We wonder if we should try another number before it strikes us how silly we've been. We can go straight to the person! That's what social media lets you do. We leave a comment on Rangaswami's blog, ConfusedofCalcutta, and promptly get a reply. He's flying to San Francisco, but he leaves his Facebook and Twitter contacts, along with a cell phone number.

Hours later, Rangaswami describes the changes since the 2005 article. Then, he says, there were either traditional communications or weird stuff with funny names, like blogs and wikis. People at BT now embrace a full range of online tools, and they use them more and more, especially as young workers join the company. "The new people come infected with the new world," he says.

More than 16,000 BT employees work together on wikis, using the same technology as Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that lets anyone post or edit entries. But instead of teaming up to edit an online encyclopedia, employees gather on them to write software, map cell-phone base stations, launch branding campaigns.Nearly every new project hatches a wiki. This is especially valuable in a global economy, where engineers in Asia can pick up a project as Europeans go to bed. The new groups that evolve on these wikis raze traditional hierarchies: An intern can amend the work of a senior engineer. Meanwhile, some 10,500 employees at BT ( that Rangaswami knows of) are already on Facebook. BT is also offering an internal social network. But just like Facebook and Twitter, it won't work unless it attracts a crowd. Rangaswami can't force anyone to use it. It would be fruitless to try. To hear Rangaswami describe it, all his team can do is provide tools and watch.

There's a lot to look at. "We've spent years talking about the value of the water-cooler conversations," he says. "Now we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision-making migrate. We see how people really work." Why does this matter? The company can spot teams that form organically, and then can place them on targeted projects. It can pinpoint the people who transmit ideas. These folks are golden. "A new class of supercommunicators has emerged," he says.

Good networkers have always had their ways to work around the direct reports and dotted lines diagrammed on company charts. They've created informal networks. Now, with social media, they have a fast-expanding set of tools to extend these relationships, and even to change their companies. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research detail an example from Best Buy (BBY) in their new book about social media, Groundswell. In 2006 two marketing managers at the company worked weekends to create an in-house social network, Blue Shirt Nation. Now it has grown to more than 20,000 participants, 85% of them sales associates. In a company with a 60% annual turnover rate, this group churns at only 8.5%, blogs Gary Koelling, one of the founders. And Blue Shirt Nation gets results. A promotional drive on the site helped persuade 40,000 employees to sign up for 401(k) retirement accounts. This bottom-up approach moves a whole lot faster than initiatives that wind through a corporate approval process. Drawbacks? The new order favors those who network, create buzz, and promote their brand. Managers have to make sure that quieter employees don't lose out.

The change is even more dramatic in media. In the world we envisioned in 2005, the old dogs of mainstream media (like us) would learn the new tricks of blogging and use them to extend our reach and clout. We figured we'd be surrounded by constellations of standalone bloggers, each with his or her own niche.