How does one become a leading social media expert? "I decided to leave the real IT world to run off and join the circus," said Chris Brogan.

Brogan spent 16 years working in the IT trenches for a major telecommunications carrier, including trying to stuff big servers into tiny rental cars for remote installations. He now works for CrossTech Media, the company that puts on the ITEC shows I’ve been speaking at, so I've had the chance to hear several of Brogan's speeches and he's been forced to listen to mine in return.

“Turning ROI Into Return on Influence” is the title of one of Brogan's presentations. The ideas Brogan presents in this and other talks help companies realize social media and social networking are new ways to reach out to customers. These methods humanize the company and let customers engage in areas they like rather than what the corporate marketing department decides.

“You probably remember GM's first attempt to engage customers on the Web, when they made video clips of their Tahoe available so people could make their own mashups of what the Tahoe meant to them,” Brogan says. “Their mistake was not considering what the community wanted to talk about, and the community wanted to talk about things like how the Tahoe crushes the environment.” Computerworld listed this campaign in its recent article “The 10 Dumbest Viral Marketing Campaigns Ever.”

But GM learned. “They now have a nice site called GMNext, and also set up communities for car fans to talk about the cars they're passionate about,” Brogan says. “Corvette owners jumped at that, and they now have a much better social networking reputation.” For instance, you can now find pages on their corporate Web site linking to car clubs all over the world for the Corvette, Camaro, and other car models.

Another great example of the power of social media against clueless corporations was the frustrated user who blogged about being stuck in “Dell Hell” because of driver and support problems. Dell realized the power of social networks when it saw the number of other bloggers and sites talking about Dell Hell push those Web sites higher up the search rankings than Dell's official site.

Dell took several steps to fix its reputation. Leveraging the passions of customers, and turning them into something a little more positive for the company, Dell unveiled its IdeaStorm Web site. This allows customers to list the kind of features and products they want to see Dell make. And it didn't stop there.