The corporate enterprise is waking up to two major things.

1. The future belongs to the trends that youth embrace – i.e. Social Networking, Blogging, Digital Media etc.

2. These mediums are in fact, a perfect fit to business and brand – not an enemy or change that should be feared.

In 2001, when we started selling branded social networks for businesses, many executives were thinking “What if someone says something we don’t like? We should not let our customers interact with each other!”

In 2008, we basically see only a tiny bit of that fear left, mostly we see people who realize how valuable it is to bring their customer to right to their face – and that there is no greater evangelist than your own customers!

Besides, wouldn’t you rather control the brand and conversation rather than have it made somewhere outside of your view or control? I’d think it would be scary to let your customers communicate on anything that wasn’t part of your own site and brand!

Seems like it should be self-evident, since these same executives were spending all kinds of cash on trade events and training seminars to increase adoption of their product or service, yet they felt the online mirror of all those activities seemed like it might be out of control.

Truth is, the old threaded message boards were out of control, but true Social Networks are self-governing because they reward valued insight with respect and recognition in the community.

Subtle change makes all the difference.

In a viciously competitive global market, in world driven by stock value, in an industry where LEAN is sexy, providing adequate customer service is frequently good enough, and doing more with less has become excruciatingly cliché.

FreshBooks’ story is a refreshing anomaly. A culture of people who get it from top to bottom in the context of a company still right sized to keep the momentum going.

The AOL example should prove to be more interesting as it plays out.

The fact that Morris and Gruber get it certainly means the internal champions for capitalizing on social media are well placed, but shifting a culture of that size should prove to be a challenge on many practical levels, not the least of which is the legal and MAR/COM departments’ death grip on outgoing messaging.

I’ll bet heads exploded all over both departments at AOL when they hear these guys tell everyone in the company to go out and defend the company in the blogosphere.