Social media represents an incredibly important opportunity to leverage new (and existing) technology onto internal and external strategic and operational business objectives of all shapes and sizes. Who, for example, would have suspected that new product lifecycles could be affected by wikis, blogs, file sharing, and opinions? That focus group in Peoria is forever gone, replaced by blogs open to customers from Illinois to California to New York to Paris to Shanghai. Innovation is now a contact sport played by a globally distributed team.