I am standing here in the midst of a blizzard. One I brought on myself, with the help of a few thousand of my closest friends. All I did was press the Blizzard Button and voila, the perfect storm began.

There is no snow or wind associated with this storm. Just words. Ideas. Opinions. And they riccochet off each other and fly off into space and zoom off satelittes and pounce on websites and materialize on blackberrys.

I tossed out a proposition about God, that we can learn from Him (from the great religions of the world) to be better businesspeople. And then my PR team placed the concept on the websites of various magazines and readers liked or hated what I said and passed on comments and, emailed friends, and shot off fyi’s to other editors and on and on.

All we did was throw an intellectual stone into the middle of the cyber-ocean and a chain reaction of responses transported my proposition from New York to Delhi, from the Christian community to the business elite, from CEOs at Siemens’ Ascent Conference in Berlin to Donald Trump, to a realtor in Orange County.

The true power of digitial PR is that once you give birth to a provocative idea, a million carrier pigeons take over, spreading the message for you. Unlike traditional PR, you don’t have to ask, or should I say plead, with others to run the story, you can’t stop them. The blizzard is a self-perpetuating machine. It is a thing of awe and beauty.

How do you seed the storm:

1. Make sure your idea has teeth. No one is going to get viral with pablum.
2. Help to accelerate the wind speed by incorporating your messsage in a blog and linking every blogger who responds to your idea to your blog.
3. Seek links from every site that picks up on your message and broadcasts it to their community.
4. Ask opinion leaders in each relevant community to opine on your idea and to spread their thoughts to their constituents.

Then sit back, put a log on the fire and enjoy the storm. Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow.

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