Problem:
Technology can give us answers as fast as we can type. It can also vastly increase communication instantly - both within an organization and from company to company. Knowledge, as they say, wants to be free -- but if it's knowledge that your company plans to sell, or that concerns something that they want to sell, "free" may not be the optimal price. On the other hand, if you cut off this flow of informal communication, you may miss sharing in crucial pieces of information that those who remain connected to the informal network can pick up.
Is there some kind of optimal strategy that a company can employ to receive benefits from informal information sharing (both within and outside) while avoiding the associated potential costs -- or do we just have to accept that this kind of information flow is a kind of lottery distributing wins and losses across participants more or less at random depending on who is where when and who shares what with whom? I'd appreciate both your thoughts on strategy and any experiences that you've had illustrating these situations and the lessons you learned from them.