This is an extract from Martin Thomas’s new book Crowdsurfing: Surviving and Thriving in the Age of Consumer Empowerment, one of several that we’ll be running in the coming weeks.

There is a story, probably apocryphal, about an architect who designed a university campus.  On the day of the grand opening, he was approached by the Head of the University, who commented that ‘the buildings look fantastic, but why haven’t you put in any paths to connect them?’   The architect smiled knowingly and replied, “I will come back in six months to put in the paths, once I have seen how the students have chosen to walk between the buildings.”

Rather than impose his own views of where the paths should go, or use some elaborate computer simulation model, he believed that an enlightened architect should respond to the behaviour of the crowd.

Welcome to the world of the crowd surfer: a world in which a new generation of business and political leaders have learned how to harness the energy, ideas and enthusiasm of today’s empowered consumers.  They are not manipulators, demagogues or mere populists.  They have been smart enough to recognise that people around the globe – emboldened and enthused by a new spirit of enquiry and self-expression, and powered by the internet – have changed the rules of the game.  They realise that surrendering absolute control – giving their customers, partners and employees a greater say in the way that their businesses operate – is paradoxically, the most effective way to manage their corporate or political destiny.

Our crowd surfers are the people that concur with racing driver Mario Andretti’s maxim that: “If everything seems under control you’re just not going fast enough.”  They are people such as Proctor & Gamble’s Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, A.G. Lafley, who describes how business leaders: “are operating in what is very much a ‘let go’ world.

Martin Thomas has spent 23 years running marketing communications agencies in PR, advertising, sponsorship, entertainment marketing and new media.  The blog of the book is www.crowdsurfing.net

We thought you might find it useful to know what social media activities our clients are focusing on at the moment:

1  Social Media ‘ecosystem’ audits – we are helping clients to explore what is being said about them on social media networks, including newspaper sites, blogs and twitter. With media events coming up, for example, they are keen to know what is being said about them through social media and what the key/growing topics are, so they can be properly briefed. They are then looking for recommendations from us as to how they can act upon the findings in the social media realm.

2  Social media guidelines – we are helping clients develop guidelines for using social media to protect the reputation of their businesses, but also to guide staff on how best to use blogs and social media networks.  Lots of agencies are bombarding brand teams with social media suggestions and there is a risk that the company might not follow best practice.

3  Social media executive briefings  – we are organising briefings for leaders of businesses and brand teams who want to understand what is driving social media and how it is affecting their business; they also want to see good examples of how other businesses are using social media.

We are finding that a lot of large organisations are keen to see how they can use social media to be more personal in their dealings with customers. They want to bring out ‘the real’ side of the organisation, not what they see as the stereotypical perceptions that have often been generated by the traditional media.

4  Blogging – We are helping clients to develop blogs and become part of communities that are relevant to those blogs. We looking at what content works best and how to develop different channels to support blogs, for example Twitter and Flickr.

We are also looking at how we can optimise blogs and publicise them.  And we are getting requests to develop concepts for media blogs so media teams can efficiently distribute their own messages and develop their own platforms.  This is based on the knowledge that key audiences are no longer reading traditional medi,  nor are they always visiting corporate web sites.

5  Twitter – we are helping clients to develop Twitter channels and advising them on how best they can use Twitter to develop relationships with key audiences and to link to relevant and useful content (such as interesting videos on YouTube or articles in e-newsletters). While there is a lot of unofficial brand stuff created and shared through social media, companies can use Twitter to act as a ‘curator’ of interesting and relevant material, so audiences know which to go to.

I don’t know about you, but I get mildly irritated by all those “humorous” emails that clog up my email: pictures of cats doing cute things, photos of defaced billboards, accounts of comical misunderstandings, and all the rest.

Then again, I quite like the idea of putting them all in one website, particularly if it means they’re not chewing up my bandwidth or taking up space on my hard disk. Alex Tew thinks so too, which is why he has created Popjam, a site for sharing what he calls “the web’s funniest content”. Tew is the young man who made himself a dollar millionaire, by creating the Million Dollar Homepage, which sold a million single pixels to companies at a dollar a time.

Essentially, Popjam is just another social media site, like YouTube, Flickr or Twitter. You share videos, links and photographs, the only criterion being that they have to be funny. Like the million dollar homepage, it’s an incredibly simple idea, though whether it will be popular enough to draw enough advertising revenue to make Tew’s next million dollars, it’s too early to say.

Still, as business blogger Nick Saalfeld points out, Tew also created the highly successful Sock and Awe game, inviting people to throw a virtual shoe at a virtual George Bush. The game has so far received 90 million hits. So it seems the man has a genius for apparently simple ideas that spread like wildfire – the kind of thing that makes every business trying to harness the power of social media exclaim: “If only I’d thought of that!”

Let’s face it, you probably won’t think of the next million dollar idea. But if you do, tell us first.

Jeff Jarvis, owner of the famous blog, www.buzzmachine.com, has brought out a new book called, What would Google do? We have referred to it before.

The book, which I highly recommend, is about the impact that Google is having on our thinking and our behaviour. The impact that Google is having on our society and on the world of business.

Google invited Jeff Jarvis to address people at their HQ to talk about the book. In a wide ranging discussion Jarvis talks about the impact of Google on the media and what businesses can learn from Google. Essentially he argues that businesses, like Google in a sense, are platforms and they need to develop networks around themselves. They have to help the network around them succeed.

Jarvis is fast, witty, and inspired. He’s grasped a vision of how society is changing under the influence of Google and the internet and his insights are invaluable. Spend some time with Jarvis and your view of the world changes.