A growing number of companies are tapping into social media channels, including online communities and forums and through use of tools such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter to engage with customers and business partners and create a conduit for new product, service, and customer experience ideas.

Given the rising interest that CIOs have in improving customer experience, driving innovation, and, of course, fulfilling their commitment to delivering genuine business value to the organization, I thought it might be useful to share a few examples of companies in different industries that are exploiting social media interactions with customers to generate fresh ideas.

Ramping up its war on Microsoft's business applications, Google has opened an online store that lets third-party developers sell on-demand software that's integrated with Google's Web services offerings.

Plans for the store, dubbed Google Apps Marketplace, were leaked to the Wall Street Journal back in February, but Google has been officially mum on the concept. On Tuesday evening, the company pulled back the curtain on a program that already includes 50 vendors.