If there’s any major trend reshaping the way information is being shared and distributed across the online world, it’s the growing ubiquity of social media — and this is reshaping the way businesses interact with customers.

Speaking at this week’s FastForward conference in Las Vegas, Charlene Li, author of Groundswell: Living in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, demonstrated how companies are positioned to take advantage of the growing ubiquity of social networks in a variety of creative ways.  For example, postings on social media sites are likely to be integrated with one’s activities across the Web.  She observes that “social networks will be like air… Social networks will rush to open themselves up.” At some point, comments posted on a site such as Facebook will be viewable across the range of Web-based services and sites.

Another effect is that “companies will be transformed from the outside in,” Li says.  Companies have opened up with the help of their customers. Some companies use Facebook for their employee recruiting. But many are still afraid of losing control.

One company embracing the agility of Enterprise 2.0 approaches is Thomson Reuters. Venkat Khrisnanoorthy, head of platform development for the company, said that the financial information company was bogged down with two many products that “customers had to stitch together,” as well as issues with ability to provide large amounts of data from multiple sources. “We have 40 content databases with terabytes of information,” he explained. The company has developed a content search through which information could be quickly captured by financial analysts at customer sites.

Speed of information delivery and collaboration were also top of mind at Accenture and Cisco, part of a panel of social media organizations. Amit Bansal of Cisco reported that because of a social networking intiative fully supported by CEO John Chambers, the company has been able to speed up product delivery times to within 120 days.

Kevin Dana of Accenture also provided good advice to managers looking to develop social networking capabilities: Don’t be afraid to experiment, try out new approaches. “Failure is okay, as long as you don’t spend too much.”