There is an undoubted conviction in Charlene Li’s voice when she says that emerging social technologies can be turned to a business’s advantage. As legal professionals, IT chiefs, data managers and information professionals worry about the rapid spread of social media tools and their implications, she calmly announces: "It’s all going to be fine."

Li, an independent, influential thought leader and guide to social technologies, is urging businesses to give up on control.

"You cannot control the flow of information on social technologies," she says. "You cannot decide what information your employees should or should not upload on their social communications tools. So why don’t we just stop worrying about it and turn it to our competitive advantage?"

As researchers have pointed out, staff are demanding "technology democracy" within their organisations: they want to decentralise the power over information from the IT team and they want the freedom to use social technologies at their workplace. Then there are the customers, bloggers and Tweeters, who use their digital applications to post for all the world to see about their experiences of a particular company’s customer service, its latest products and even its adverts.

Most information professionals and organisations view this sort of behaviour as a threat, but Li sees a brighter side: "Social technologies help communicate and share information and will only attract more people. Orchestrate and organise the information you share, train your staff and have a mutual agreement on the kind of information on public domain. Don’t control: take charge."

She adds that trust is crucial: "If staff want technology democracy, then they have to understand the responsibilities of a democratic web world."

Li calls on information professionals within institutions to encourage staff to discuss and communicate business information in public forums but also to advise them on the perils of leaking sensitive and mission-critical information.

In her best-selling book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Li explains how to take advantage of communities, blogs, wikis, Facebook and YouTube and turn what could be a threat for a business into an opportunity.

She co-authored Groundswell with Josh Bernoff. In the book, published by Harvard Business Press in May 2008, they define groundswell as a social phenomenon where technology empowers individuals, smaller groups of people and communities, and takes some power away from large institutions. The book brings together the rich experiences of Li and Bernoff and the consumer data they have collated from top companies following their extensive research.

According to Li, some people are sceptical about social media because they view it purely as technology. "Don’t look at it as some piece of hard-wired engineering," she advises. "Understand the relationship between these tools and its users. People just need to do some math to understand the potential of new media."

She says that there was some paranoia around Google too when the search company first started up. "I believed in Google from the day it started 11 years ago. While for many it’s a technology company, I think its business model is that of a media company: it’s an audience aggregator." She says most of the latest social media tools are audience aggregators, and that it is what will drive their success.

Several industry analysts view the latest valuation of micro-blogging sensation Twitter at $1bn (£630m) as recklessly over the top, but not Li. "I can understand that side of the argument," she says, "but I am happy with the valuation, because I believe in Twitter’s power to encourage people to share information in real time. It helps me connect directly with others and this makes such social media tools a lot more worthy."

She adds: "With so many people using it, there is definitely some potential. " Li herself has more than 23,000 followers on her Twitter account. She also offers the useful reminder that when Google started, it took more than a couple of years to make money.

Li explains how some companies have gained out of embracing the social technologies. She cites PC maker Dell snapping when bloggers posted their terrible experiences of its services. We don’t respond to bloggers, thundered the company. It was only after the bloggers came down even more heavily on the manufacturer, adding to the damage to its reputation, that Dell decided to enter the blogosphere and started encouraging people to write positive and negative news about it openly.

"Dell is a brilliant example of how initially a company consciously avoided Web 2.0 and later on integrated social media within its culture and gained because it brought transparency to its personality and maintained direct relations with its users," says Li.

More recently, Dell has created a series of social media guides to help small and medium businesses effectively use Web 2.0 tools to grow and better serve their customers. Each guide offers an overview of the approach, the opportunity, tips for getting started, examples of best practice and case studies. The company hopes its guides help "take the mystery out of social media and also spark conversation and idea sharing".

Closer to home, Li points to the example of giant retailer Tesco, which is using social networking to improve its customer service and experience. There are reports that the retailer is also toying with the idea of iPhone apps before Christmas, for grocery shopping on the go. Li adds that she foresees mobile devices and mobile computing getting more powerful within the social technologies arena.

So what other trends are catching Li’s eye? She thinks that the future of search is personalised, social and semantic. "It’s all about you," she says.

She believes that in future the power of developing small widgets will be placed in the hands of customers. Widgets are small, bite-sized applications that can live on a desktop, web page or mobile device like the iPhone. The flexible, nimble development of these applications is transforming how customers are using technology, Li says.

"One of my key visions is that social technologies must be accessible by anyone and from anywhere. Right now, social media activities are centralised and this has to change."

So how did it all begin and what gave her so much faith in emerging social technologies? In 1995, when information on the web was slowly taking shape, Li was working on online and newspaper publishing with the San Jose Mercury News and Community Newspaper Company. She developed a towns page and encouraged people to publish and share local communities’ information online and connect with each other. "As people found sharing information real-time and bonding through the internet extremely valuable, I knew this was the direction in which future information sharing would move."

After four years in the publishing world, she was, most recently, the vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. In her latest research on the convergence of emerging technology, her group defines social networking as having three baseline components: a profile with a person’s information, the ability for people to connect to each other via those profiles, and the ability to do something useful or valuable they couldn’t have done otherwise.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more online applications allows users to maintain a digital profile and connect with people. Li thinks the future also lies in applications such as Sidewiki, which allows anyone to add comments to any page on the web with just a Firefox plug-in.

She wrote the research report with Jeremiah Owyang, a member of Altimeter. Li runs Altimeter, which provides advice and consulting on digital strategies, helping professionals looking to understand and thrive in a new economy driven by social media tools and techniques.

She runs a blog site by the same name Altimeter. A graduate of Harvard with a magna cum laude degree, Li has also been voted one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company magazine.

Her current research agenda includes finding how companies can use technologies like social networks, blogs, wikis, RSS and widgets to meet their company goals.

"Embrace emerging social technologies, carefully and cautiously – and see where it takes you. This is what my upcoming book – Open: How leaders win by letting go – is all about," concludes Li, whose current Facebook status – Sending Chapter 1 of my new book to my editors – is being well received by her fans.