This approach isn't entirely new. In 2007, Wired ran a story by Clive Thompson headlined "The See-Through CEO," in which he wrote, "Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. If you were cagey about your plans, you had the upper hand; if you kept your next big idea to yourself, people couldn't steal it. Now, billion-dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away." In August, Romy Ribitzky wrote a three-part series for Portfolio.com on how businesses can use social media.

"You're seen as a much more engaged company when you have a presence on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube," says Kodak's Jeffrey Hayzlett. "You show a level of engagement other companies don't have."

Hayzlett, whose Twitter feed has 12,091 followers, describes his approach to social media as "the four E's":

"Engagement with our customers and community.

"Education. It helps to educate us and our users.

"Excite. Exciting people about the products.

"Evangelize. Make people brand ambassadors for you."

Hayzlett is something of an evangelist himself. In August, Kodak used its blog, A Thousand Words, to invite users to name its new video camera, a task that branding experts and naming consultants traditionally get millions to undertake. 2,483 commenters posted their suggestions on Kodak.com and countless others on Twitter using the #NameAKodak hash tag. The final name will be announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

So serious is Kodak about what goes on on social networks, it's currently in the process of hiring a "chief listener," a position Hayzlett describes as "someone who watches the conversation going on about our brand and helps to funnel activity to leverage that conversation. Naturally, they're using social media to widen the candidate pool.

Hayzlett has gone so far as to compile an instruction manual for other businesspeople called "Social Media Tips," which Kodak gives away on its directory of Blogs and Online Communities.

Among the tips offered is the answer to this hypothetical question in the "Troubleshooting Social Media" section: "Someone left a negative comment on our blog/Facebook page/Twitter/YouTube video!" (OK, that's not really a question, but the request for advice is implied.)

"Don't panic! Assess the comment to understand if it has merit or not. If the commenter has a legitimate complaint, use it as an opportunity to thank them for their feedback and take it into consideration to improve your business."

"Quite frankly, it's a very simple thing to do," Hayzlett tells Portfolio.com. "You just listen to your customers."

In rare cases, executives take the opportunity not just to thank negative commenters for their feedback but to strike back—albeit in ways that don't threaten their business. This past July, Gizmodo, a gadget blog owned by Gawker Media, posted a series of caricatures by the artist Dan Meth called The Seven Types of Employees You Meet at Best Buy, which included Car Audio Thug ("You suspect if he didn't have a job selling car stereos, he'd be stealing them") and Pervy Geek Squad Guy ("This guy searches every computer that's in for service for porn").

Within a day, Best Buy's Barry Judge had posted a drawing of a bespectacled slacker in an "I ♥ Brooklyn" T-shirt under the headline The One Type of Gizmodo Blogger ("You'll find this guy on his couch, sporting an ironic T-shirt with a delivery-food stain of some kind").

To soften the joke's blow—a representative of a major corporation publicly mocking an individual blogger might look petty or bullying, after all—Judge affixed the following intro, "My team brought me this idea in response to a post about Best Buy employees on Gizmodo yesterday. Frankly, I didn’t think it was that funny and wasn’t sure it aligned with my core values. I was excited though that the team was thinking about new ways to use new media, so I have decided to support their thinking and publish it." (So, in case anyone in the boardroom objected, let it be known it was the fault of Judge's underlings—maybe Car Audio Thug.)

Cuban sees another upside to using social media: saving himself time. "In my first companies, I had pages and pages of phone calls I needed to make to customers and prospects and media and spent much of the rest of the day answering phone calls coming in. It was a huge time suck. Interactive media solves much of that problem and has made me much more efficient."

He says the number of emails he gets in a day has fallen from more than a thousand to a couple of hundred. "I attribute that purely to my ability to communicate via my blog and Twitter," he writes.

For Martin, it's enhanced his creativity and exposed him to new ideas. "The more you open your process, you're always stunned by what you get back," he says.

Lately, he's been using his blog to search for Bolislav Vainman, a Russian man whom he says he split his Bar Mitzvah gifts with 22 years ago through a charity group that supported Russian Jews. His posts on Vainman have attracted volunteers offering to help track him down and, Martin says, interest from editors, publishers, and filmmakers who want him to document the search, possibly as it takes him to Russia.

Suddenly, Martin's sideline—the site comes with a tongue-in-cheek disclosure that states, "I swear I don't really do this stuff while I am on boring conference calls, because none of my conference calls are boring. At all. For serious."—might get in the way of his day job.

"I told my boss that I may have to take a sabbatical to find Bolislav Vainman," Martin deadpans. "I don't think he'd appreciate that."

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Matt Haber is the media blogger for Portfolio.com.