Social media is transforming the way companies communicate to its internal employees and to the public. Many organizations have changed their marketing and communications strategies and tactics by launching company Wikis and blogs, official Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, YouTube Channels, internal video contests, podcasts, and endless conversation channels. I spoke with Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications, at the Health Care Communicators Summit last month about held June 8-9 at Kaiser Permanente's Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center, about how social media is revolutionizing corporate communications and PR. @MarkRaganCEO described how employee communications have dramatically changed over the last several decades. Since his father started the Chicago-based PR firm in 1968, employee communications consisted of an employee publication, press releases and C-suite communication cascading down from the top executives to the employees. Social media has changed the rules, and opened up avenues of engagement that never existed before. Now corporate communications sits in the very center of influence within their company, creating conversations and communicating directly to employees and consumers, shareholders and stakeholders, through social media. According to @MarkRaganCEO, there are no intermediaries, you can go directly to the source. "What social media does is create a conversation and ideas flowing back and forth from the C-suite to front line employees, middle managers and then back again. The whole idea of social media is to remove the middle man, and get everyone to connect in this one huge knowledge-base. Through conversation, through sharing, through searching, meta-tagging – it's a wonderful tool, and 5-6 years from now everyone is going to be doing it." Video is also plays a pivotal role in social media as @MarkRaganCEO says, "People just don't read as much anymore." Check out ragancommunications's YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ragancommunications Distributed by Tubemogul.