Public-relations manager James Gregson wanted to persuade a client to expand an online-marketing campaign beyond the U.S. recently, but he didn't know to whom he should pitch the idea. So the 24-year-old used a tactic he learned from Facebook.com: He tapped his social network.

Mr. Gregson's employer, Hill & Knowlton Inc., had recently bought software from BranchIt Corp., a San Francisco start-up that supplies businesses with social-networking tools made popular by Facebook Inc. and News Corp.'s MySpace.com. Using BranchIt, Mr. Gregson found the client's regional communication directors, as well as a list of his own colleagues who had exchanged email with the directors and might be able to broker an introduction. Within days, he heard back from a colleague who helped him pitch the idea. "It's basically an easy way to combine your Rolodex with everyone else's Rolodex," says Mr. Gregson, who hasn't heard back yet from the director.

Hill & Knowlton is one of a number of companies that are co-opting consumer Web technologies for everyday office use. Examples includes social networking -- which connects people online through common acquaintances -- and "wikis" (think Wikipedia) -- which let several people change a document on a Web page and then track those changes. In the past year and a half, Intel Corp., Quark Inc., SAP AG and International Business Machines Corp. have begun experimenting with such innovations as recordings of meetings that can be downloaded to iPods, blogs where employees can talk back to their bosses, and internal Web pages that allow people to read their colleagues' meeting notes and add their own.

The experiments are still in their early days. Research firm Gartner Inc. estimates that companies spent less than $50 million on such tools last year, highlighting how consumers have flocked to new technologies more quickly than their employers in the past few years. At home, many employees are meeting people on the Web, posting their photos in shared online albums and listening to podcasts on digital-music players. But at work, they're still asking around the water cooler where to pitch ideas and they're still soliciting changes to documents by emailing them to co-workers.

Businesses have started to play catch-up, though, with many using free or cheap software available online. Josh Bancroft, an Intel engineer, is a fan of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that any visitor can edit. Last November, he and some colleagues decided to create an internal, Wikipedia-like Web site that would let people collect information and collaborate on projects instead of having to send around endless emails. He downloaded free wiki-building software and persuaded some buddies to help set up the equipment to run it. Today, the project, called Intelpedia, houses some 9,000 articles.

Last week, Brian Jarvis, an Intel marketing manager, was trying to figure out how to sell customers on Intel products that facilitate a technique called "virtualization," which allows computer servers to run multiple copies of an operating system to use computing resources more efficiently. He looked up the term on Intelpedia and found a list of ways in which virtualization can help customers. He says it was just what he needed to know and adds: "I'm amazed at the depth of content in there."

Such experiments are also happening at IBM. In March 2005, IBM engineer Jonathan Feinberg showed his colleagues a consumer Web site called del.icio.us, which lets people post their Internet bookmarks publicly. A few months later, IBM co-opted the idea by having Mr. Feinberg create an internal bookmarking system called Dogear. (Yahoo Inc. bought del.icio.us in December 2005.)

IBM now encourages employees to bookmark internal Web pages that they find useful, along with a few words describing each page. For example, Mr. Feinberg says, someone might bookmark an internal document about incentives IBM gives employees for exercising and tag it with the word "healthcare." Dogear collects all the bookmarks in one place, theoretically allowing employees to find information by searching for keywords associated with those pages.

The system has about 6,000 users who have so far collected about 100,000 bookmarks, says IBM collaboration-research manager David Millen. The company also plans to integrate part of the technology -- along with other social-networking tools -- in its Lotus collaboration software as early as next year. Rival Microsoft Corp., for its part, already offers customers a trial version of its coming SharePoint software, which will include a tool called the Knowledge Network that can help employees find out how they're connected to important contacts using social networking.

Such new office tools have helped some workers interact with one another on a more personal level. At IBM, 23-year-old researcher Sacha Chua recently talked to a colleague who had read about her research on her internal blog. The colleague mentioned that he was sorry to learn Ms. Chua was homesick. He had surfed from her internal blog to her personal Web site, where Ms. Chua had written about missing home after her recent move to IBM's Toronto office. "It was so nice," she says.

Ms. Chua says she has also gotten career advice and birthday wishes from strangers at IBM. And when she attends internal meetings and wants to read up on fellow attendees, she prints out a list of the keywords they used to tag Web pages with Dogear. That way, "you know what to talk to them about -- what they're interested in," she says.

The new Web tools are frequently easier for companies to adopt than other kinds of corporate technology. Quark, a maker of publishing software in Denver, recently replaced its entire corporate intranet with a wiki because the company could put it in place quickly instead of going through a months-long process with more traditional systems, says Julie Fouque, an internal communications specialist who is spearheading the project. An added benefit is that engineers across the globe can now collaborate on projects using wikis rather than rely on long, cumbersome email chains.

For some, trying new technology has meant defying reticent IT departments. Last year, Jeff Nolan moved from SAP's venture-capital arm to an operational role at the company and wanted to start an internal wiki using software from Socialtext Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif., start-up funded in part by SAP's VC arm. The IT department said no, bringing up privacy issues and other concerns, but Mr. Nolan signed up anyway. Employees could access Soci altext online, which meant Mr. Nolan didn't have to use SAP's equipment to run it. Later, when the IT department saw that the wiki had been a success, it agreed to manage Socialtext hardware that sits at SAP, which gives the company more control over it.

"They realized that the world would not stop spinning, and the sky would not fall, and that it actually had benefits," Mr. Nolan says.

But making it easier for employees to post material on the internal Web without first seeking approval could, in theory, make it easier to inadvertently leak company secrets. And giving tools to employees doesn't guarantee they'll be used, many companies have found.

"You have fits of success, followed by fits of failure," says Mr. Nolan, who has encouraged colleagues to experiment with blogs and corporate wikis. He launched a wiki for his own team in October but says it failed to take off because people didn't know what to do with the blank screen on the front page. In January, he asked a staff member to revamp the wiki by adding certain headings and other features that made it easier to navigate. Since then, the number of users has jumped to more than 20 from five, Mr. Nolan says.

Others haven't been as successful as Mr. Nolan. When Rich Hoeg, a researcher at Honeywell International Inc., recently launched a program that lets employees blog, he persuaded a handful of the company's most respected researchers to start their own blogs, assuming that colleagues would benefit from a peek inside their thought process. But it takes most of the researchers a few weeks to add a new post because many just don't have the time to add another task to their daily to-do list.

"I feel like their mother, nagging them," Mr. Hoeg says.