Traditional PR and marketing agencies are going the way of the dinosaur. And when I say traditional, I mean ones that are not incorporating social media and internet marketing into their core services. Why is the traditional agency threatened? Because traditional media (TV, radio, print) is no longer the most relevant voice in the marketplace. Today’s conversation is online - and consumers are the ones doing all the talking.

Here are the stats to prove it (courtesy of Adam Singer, author of The Future Buzz):

• 1 trillion  - the unique # of URLs  in Google’s index

• 2 billion - number of searches Google does each day

• 684 million - the number of visitors to Wikipedia last year

• 70 million - the number of videos on YouTube

• 133 million - number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

• 77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

• 3 million - the number of tweets per day on Twitter

• 150 million - number of active Facebook users

• 236 million - number of visitors attracted annually to Digg

Lots of impressive numbers, but what do they mean?  These stats illustrate that millions of people around the world are online, talking to each other about everything from their favorite rock star to the type of car they like to drive. People have taken the conversation online and away from traditional media and businesses. Forrester researchers Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff call it the Groundswell in a book of the same name. The groundswell is “a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” In other words, people are looking to each other for information and are no longer relying solely on the marketing information provided to them by businesses.

Because of this, businesses have lost control over how their companies and brands are perceived by consumers. The balance of power has shifted, away from business and into the hands - and keyboards - of consumers. Is this a threat or an opportunity? Depends on your perspective. Businesses thrive on control, so this lack of control is discomfiting. But if you take the time to understand the groundswell and how you can participate, it presents an overwhelming opportunity to directly interact with your customers.

This phenonemon has many names: groundswell, social media, online conversation, etc. Call it what you will. But it all boils down to two primary components: technology and people. A mistake made by many business people is to focus on the technology. They jump into blogging and Facebook with great enthusiasm but with little strategic thinking. As Li and Bernoff point out, the successful way to engage your audiences online is to “concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies.”

So if the social media is about relationship-building first, technology second, shouldn’t you entrust your online marketing to your communications professional, not your IT department or website designer? The savvy PR practitioner is already engaged online and has both the technical and communication skills to help businesses master this new frontier. More and more PR agencies are incorporating internet marketing capabilities in-house so they can present their clients with an integrated approach to communications. One that marries traditional “offline” marketing with new online opportunities.

It’s a new world, and I’m thrilled to be in it.