In what may herald a whole new democratic culture, India Inc. has begun to believe that such "social media" are vital office communication tools.

Mustafa Syed, a marketing analyst and project manager with interactive agency Webchutney, follows 40-odd colleagues on Twitter, a microblogging service accessible from cellphones and PCs, some of whom he has never met. "Everyone in the company is on G-chat as a rule, so there is no initial awkwardness communicating with people you have never met." Employees chat online with the CEO as well, taking up problems and discussing ideas. And when Webehutney CEO Sidharth Rao recently went to Bangalore to make a customer pitch, he was micro-blogging about the presentation live to employees in Mumbai and Delhi.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is trying to leverage online social networking for knowledge creation in its 110,000 employee-strong organisation "Socia1networking is popular with a very significant employee base," says vice president and Chief Technology Officer, K. Ananth Krishnan.

Part of the "highly connected and open culture" at TCS is 'My Site' - a website for every employee, embedded with social networking tools. Then there's Idea Storm - a site on which everybody is invited to comment on a theme. "We got 20,000 ideas out of a dialogue in 5 days," says Krishnan.

At Cognizant, newsletters and other types of internal communication have already migrated to the blogging platform. Employee blogging is central to Sun Microsystems' marketing communications strategy Top boss Jonathan Schwartz believes that employee blogs have "authenticated the Sun brand as much as or more than a buion dollar ad campaign could have done."

Schwartz's posts neither hype-up Sun products, nor over-slay competitors. Employees write about mundane problems like product delays, and invite readers to submit bug reports and suggestions. Says Ananth Shrinivas, 24, a Sun engineer whose posts are among the most widely read ones on technology, "Blogging is a way for employees who aren't related to a particular product or policy, to write about their valid concerns." Santhosh D'Souza, the Sun chief technologist, uses his blog as an extension of himself to write about whafs new in Sun technologies for potential customers.

Some bloggers, like Gaurav Mishra, Indica's brand head, are using their personal brand - created over years of blogging - to promote the brand they work for Mishra recently promoted an ad campaign for his brand on his blog and Facebook account.

A serious concern for employers could be what their employees say publicly on such sites. Says Mishra, "I ensure that my entire web presence is squeaky clean." TCS's Krishnan says if there is criticism of the company online, "we take it constructively". Microsoft doesn't review, edit, censor or endorse individual posts, says Joji GE, director HR, Microsoft India. "It's such freedom that inspires employees to blog responsibly and tap into unstructured knowledge networks online," says Abhishek Kant, a Microsoft community programme manager, one of the founders of Delhi Bloggers Association.

Cyberlaw expert Pavan Duggal says, "Employees should neither disclose anything confidential nor post defamatory content," he says.