Companies are going to need brand meaning as told by a person that can be trusted. Steve Jobs is an easy example, but, in reality, all but one company don’t have Steve Jobs and need to understand how to create a role for a trusted communicator for the business. Having one personality will be hard enough, but scaling that role into more than one person will get even more complex. In fact, Google has done exactly that by allowing multiple people to be the voice boxes for the company exemplifies how the activity generators can directly communicate with their target audiences. To be sure, Google has a more formalized process for how employees are to communicate on their own.

Organizations have built traditional infrastructure around communicating outside the company in a polished way for a reason: the message is created by professional creative folks, approved by management, tested with consumers and launched in a controlled way.

Companies turning to employee talent for communications have benefits and risks. The benefits are:

• Speed of interaction between the line managers and consumers and with it discovery of more problems/solutions,
• Increased lead user identification, and
• A higher rate of communications.

The risks can create real reasons to question implementation:

• Loss of senior management control over message content and timing,
• Increase of employee talent awareness within a company by outsiders, and
• More visibility to vision, commitments and failures after the fact.

These risks are real and leading brand driven companies have succeeded by building a product driven brand based on less personalized, indirect communications (e.g. TV and radio). As blogging and social networking take hold, how many layers of communications infrastructure (=PR, agencies) will be needed go-forward? Tools to empower communications will definitely continue to roll out to meet this area much like Salesforce.com did for the sales process in many companies over the past five years.