This New York Times article describes the positive fallout that resulted after Ph.D. candidate Johnny Chung Lee posted a YouTube video last December showing how the Nintendo Wii remote controller could transform a normal video screen into a virtual reality display (an idea I also referenced in this Emerging Technology Watch article). So far, the video has been seen more than six million times, helped Lee get a job with Microsoft and helped him get listed in this year's MIT Technology Review Young Innovators Under 35.
Lee's choice of YouTube to disseminate information about his invention was perhaps more innovative than what he actually invented. Sais the Times: "Contrast this with what might have followed from other options Mr. Lee considered for communicating his ideas. He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others."
Also, demonstrating his invention in a YouTube video allowed Lee to not only reach millions of people, it allowed for him to receive feedback and essentially test his ideas — an illustration of one of the prime uses of social media: listening to others. Those others might be your customers if you are using social media as a marketer. If you are an inventor, listening to others gives you valuable information on how your idea works and how it might be tweaked — which essentially is the value of a prototype.
Mr. Lee himself told the Times, “ 'Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself. If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened.' "