Here’s an example of crowd-sourced intelligence in action, when it comes to social media:

Peter Kim put together a big list of business uses of social media.  Then with the input of his readers, he’s expanded the original list and as of this writing there are 279 brands listed, with references to how they are using social media. 

The list includes everything from Daimler’s Slideshare account, to Intuit’s Tax Almanac wiki, to the Progressive Insurance traffic widget on Yahoo.  There are non-profits, media, government and military organizations represented too.

Now you might wonder, “what’s so unusual about a list that readers have contributed to?”  Nothing, actually.  Happens all the time on blogs and wikis.

But it did not stop with one list. 

Then another blogger sliced and diced his list.  You see, Peter had divided his list according to brands/organizations.  Then Ray Schiel of the Global Social Media Network divided the list according to applications and functionality.  Thus, if you want to see which big brands are podcasting, for instance, it’s easy to see at a glance.  Want to know which big brands have a YouTube channel?  You can find that out too, with the list of organizations involved in online video.