From Buzz Marketing for Technology:

Capturing this institutional knowledge and leveraging it across the organization is the power of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 tools are designed for individual contribution and grass roots, bottom-up type development. They must be simple to use in order to draw users to swarm around key pieces of knowledge, tagging and posting blogs and wikis.

This is in fact what many Enterprise 2.0 initiatives are based on, or are at least counting on. Knowledge management as a function or capability has had its ups and downs, but the reality is that all of us so-called knowledge workers count on access to incredibly large amounts of information and knowledge to do our jobs. If the tools work, and the knowledge not only gets captured through participation, but also grows through the synergy of collaboration, our jobs get easier, and we work better, individually and together.

The opportunity here is to extend this outside the enterprise. I don’t mean suppliers and partners – though that’s useful too. I mean to customers, prospects and everyone else who is part of the community to which you are trying to speak. I can ask the age-old marketing question “what can you learn from your customers?” but what if you can not only learn, but engage your audience in mass collaboration to make your offering better…and maybe your marketing too.