When Josh Bernoff wrote “Groundswell” together with Charlene Li, he brought to light a “spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their experience, and get what they need – information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power – from each other”.

Those people are the new “Empowered” users the company have now to deal with. But how? Where the traditional means of corporate pr are due to fail, there the answer is letting the employees embracing the social technologies and use them to reach out and solve customers’ problems.

The time has come, once and for all, to “transform your company through the employees called HEROes (highly empowered and resourceful operatives)”. A new, giant leap ahead well described by Bernoff and his co-author Ted Schadler in a new book entitled “Empowered“, where they give account of 25 case studies an dozens of examples.

I met Josh and Ted during the O’Reilly Web2.0 expo in New York and asked them a couple of questions. You can listen to their answers in the following two podcasts.

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