Combining social networking etiquette[1] (being helpful, transparent and authentic) with business engagement on LinkedIn (for one-to-one interaction), Twitter (for immediacy) and Facebook (for content sharing) more fully involves employees in the organization and increases customer intimacy and trust.
Only certain specific individuals (most frequently in roles such as sales, customer service and field consulting) were designated as "customer-facing" personnel.
Organizations further limited outside access to internal employees through filtering mechanisms such as publishing only a main switchboard number (whether routed through a live receptionist or an interactive voice response system) and generic "sales@" or "info@" email addresses.
Thirteen years later, authors Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim added structural underpinnings to the cultural shifts outlined in The Cluetrain Manifesto in their book, Social Business by Design.
The book details many of the ways social media tools and practices are being adopted within organizations, to support both internal employee collaboration and external customer engagement (which the authors describe as the "bigger problem").