Sharing a personal experience about a product or company has become a very quick and simple procedure for those wanting to communicate feelings of pleasure and delight with friends, family and even co-workers. Even more popular: quickly sharing displeasure.

With the availability of multiple social-networking portals such as Twitter and Facebook, consumers hold the ability to either help or hinder your brand with a simple tweet or status update. This recent Harvard Business Review article, “Empowered,” by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, shares a great summary of best practices with companies such as Best Buy and Vail Resorts. The article describes how they’ve embraced the growing trends in social media and learned successful ways to evolve and benefit from it.