“On the Internet, the least-visited blog and the largest corporate marketing site occupy the same cultural real estate: both are just a click away.” — Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing

Can you feel it? That sentence pulses with unlimited potential. Just. A. Click. Away. For those of us in public relations we can’t help but think of the voices of 25 million bloggers, and 70 million Facebook, 110 million Myspace, and 40 million Bebo members. Word-of-mouth never harbored such potential. The opportunity of integrating just-a-click-away real estate with word-of-mouth millions can make your head spin — public relations that center upon conversations with your public, not talking at your public.

But hold on a moment. I know what you’re thinking — social networking is easy, just ghostwrite some snappy blogs, set up a fan page on Facebook, dabble in Twitter and the world will follow. Not so fast. If you aren’t genuine, if you don’t understand the diversity of your consumers and if you don’t truly seek their counsel, they’re going to beat a path to your door for all the wrong reasons — to expose you for a fraud. Think back to Walmart’s misdirected 2006 blog called “Wal-marting Across America,” in which bloggers became very vocal when it was discovered the bloggers were underwritten by Walmart. And that one of them was a photographer for the Washington Post. Ouch.

Compare that to the success of Threadless.com’s “design by democracy” — where thousands happily submit t-shirt designs each week, a community of 600,000 votes on them and the selected designs rapidly sell out. Or Proctor & Gamble’s insightful use of InnoCentive — a network of 140,000 scientists who work on corporate solutions. The result? Swiffer, to name just one. Or the SETI@home project whose volunteers download a screen saver that scans radio telescope data whenever the person isn’t using his or her computer. In 2005, 5.2 million volunteer users logged three million years of computing time .

You can gather the insights of millions to improve your products and services, generate innovative thinking that blossoms internally or help you tackle a larger problem. In short, you can start a conversation in which you really come to know and understand the diverse communities of your consumers and one in which their needs and interests drive you to simply be better at what you do. The result? Better business solutions.

Remember — launching a social media campaign isn’t a quick fix and it shouldn’t be a ploy. The ethics of social networks must be respected. That means you can’t SPAM, you have to be transparent and you need to work hard on the front end to establish genuine, meaningful dialogues with your consumers on the back end.

One of the best ways, today, to centralize a social network so that you can best capitalize on the decentralized nature of social networking is to utilize Wordpress in the design of your website. You get the look of a webpage with the interactive feel of a blog, and thousands of free themes and plugins so you can customize your experience. It’s also an open source project that is always being improved upon, is quick to install and free. Combine this with the back end Google analytics that show you the who, what, when, where, why and how of your web visitors and — bingo — you have the means of starting any number of real conversations.

How to start a conversation? Begin here.

Get to know your consumers.
We’re not talking mail-in surveys. We’re talking about getting personal with one-on-one interviews, phone calls, and focus groups that give you the opportunity to ask questions and respond with new questions based on those answers. Sessions like these are gold mines — and sticking to the questionnaire is a no-no. Communicate. Engage. Discover. Get to know how they interact with your products, your company and the web. Where will they be most comfortable communicating with you in the world of web? Then visit those social media sites and monitor discussion threads to see where you can add something worthwhile to the conversation. Uncover their needs and interests so that you can understand their perspective, where they’re going and where they’ve been. The line between consumer and producer is blurring and if you don’t want to fall behind, you need to get in front of your consumer and have a conversation.

Ditch demographics, respect diversity.
Once you’ve started the conversation with a blog site, don’t make the mistake of putting your consumers into neat little demographic cubbyholes like age and gender. That used to work, but it no longer does. Web media are full of surprises and have the back-end stats to back that up. iVillage isn’t just for women — 44 percent of visitors are men. And it isn’t just men that are peering through the pages of ESPN.com — nearly 27 percent are women.

Instead of generic demographics like age and gender, you have to think of your communities in terms of interest. Here’s where Google analytics comes in because diversity rules and you need to see and respond to that diversity. You’re not using stats to cubbyhole, you’re using stats to expand your diverse community and create micro-communities based upon their interests. As Jeff Howe puts it when discussing online collective intelligence, “If great minds think alike — and in many circumstances they do — then they really constitute only one mind.” That limits you. If you think in terms of generic demographics, then you’re undermining potential conversations with your very different consumers.

Further, Howe notes, “…collective intelligence is diminished by too many common characteristics. If flourishes in direct proportion to the amount of diversity contained within a group of people, and their ability to express their individual viewpoints. In order to be wise, then, the crowd can’t act like a crowd at all.” Think of group discussions you’ve been in where, initially, people toss out what may seem like ‘outrageous’ ideas. As the group conversation begins, some succumb to the crowd mentality and start to retract their ‘outrageous’ ideas — and it’s often the ‘outrageous’ that leads to innovation. With blog sites and back end analytics, the ‘outrageous’ isn’t damped down and diversity rules.

Collective intelligence — in the form of consumer feedback — can be your best friend as long as you respect the diversity and ingenuity of varying opinions. This is your opportunity to identify with and meet the needs of a variety of micro-niches.

Adapt and integrate with user-generated inspiration.
To do so, think off the page. Press releases and blogs need not be mutually exclusive. Press releases are very effective at quickly and directly engaging the media and when posted to your site, they’re excellent at generating SEO.

Now, buck up your PR efforts with your blog site. Utilize the full potential of your blog site with Google analytics that tell you how many people are visiting, why they came to your site, what they looked at, what search terms they used to find you and what sites led them to you. What more could you ask for? This is a self-generating public relations machine based upon what your consumers are most interested in and what they most seek from you.

If you find that a large number of Facebook visitors have come to your site looking for X, then give them more X. Answer their questions. Do research on their behalf. Engage them in a conversation by posting a blog that talks about X and goes a bit further. If you sell guitars, allow an employee to discuss how independent bands can make it during an economic recession. If the stats show that site visitors from numerous social media sites are picking up on the conversation you started — then nurture that conversation. If no one is interested — try a new train of thought. In this way, you’re not talking at them. You’re communicating with them. And word-of-mouth becomes your public relations vehicle.

With such a wide variety of social media on hand – be certain to engage all of them with your blog site. Allow people to share your blogs and vlogs. Let them “Digg” you. Become their Friend. Start a Facebook Group that caters to their interests. Encourage them to bring others into the conversation. Be holistic.

Loosen up.
In order to be genuine, you have to let the reins go a bit. If you provide technological solutions for retailers, it isn’t going to be genuine to have a public relations specialist start a conversation about tech-geek tips. Go to the source — let the tech-geek create the community. Find out who, internally, is willing to converse and who is best suited to conversing about what. Get everyone talking. Can a PR person start a conversation? Certainly. Just be transparent — get in front of your community rather than hiding behind a press release. Then everyone wins.

That doesn’t mean you have to let everyone run amok. Look at Google stats together, review blogs to stay on message, but be sure your blogs honestly address your audience’s concerns and interests and that they are conversations — not pitches.

ROI.
Conversations make effective public relations. According to the Aberdeen Group, Best-in-Class companies — those with 95% improvement in marketing effectiveness, 90% improvement in visibility into user-generated content and 80% improvement in return-on-marketing investment — have dedicated resources to social media marketing, have a process in place to enhance social media marketing and use social media monitoring tools . A whopping 70% of Best-in-Class use company-hosted blogs, 65% use the back end data analysis tools and 42% monitor social media to develop a context for their conversation. It’s a win-win opportunity where conversations become public relations and you align your interests with those of your clients.

Be social. Be real. Be transparent. Happy networking.