Having told Summit attendees not to fear consumer-generated media, Steve Rubel described how to embrace it. Part 2.

Steve Rubel is the Vice President of Client Services at CooperKatz & Company. He’s also the author of the Micro Persuasion blog about consumer-generated media. He is an evangelist not only for consumers to be involved with the media they consume, but also for his clients to embrace what consumers are doing.

Rubel spoke at February's iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point. In yesterday's installment of that speech, he asked: "How do we deal with the fact that consumers are in control? What do we actually do to leverage this voice? And how do we keep our margins high so we can go to these fancy-schmancy conferences?"

Here are his answers to at least the first two questions:

Steve Rubel: The secret to success here is to listen and engage your customer evangelist. Here’s another book for your reading list, “Creating Customer Evangelists.” How do you do that? Well, you find your brand champions. You listen to them actively. Really listen to them.

You engage them.

And you empower them to spread your message peer to peer. This is FLEE for short, F-L-E-E, if you want to remember it.

So let’s take each one of these. Find: Use the emerging tools that are out there to listen to the conversations. Okay, they’re free. There’s no reason not to. Here’s a sample of this. Pub/Sub, Technorati, Feedsters and even just Google. Google is very good at scooping up blog content. I would also suggest going to Flicker and Delicious and typing your product names and seeing what consumers are sharing about your products.

Then find the hubs; find the networks -- the people who can influence you or influence your consumers. Here’s just a sampling. Robert Scobal is an influential blogger at Microsoft. He has 10,000 or 15,000 readers every day. He’s probably one of the most vocal people inside the corporation right now and he is a network hub. Davenetics is another great blog on media, another hub. And Gawker is a great hub as well.

Track who links to these hubs. The people who link to these sites that are … that your people are hanging out at, your consumers are hanging out at, those are the folks who are reading these sites as well. So track the links. Use the tools. Technorati lets you do that.

And map out the networks. It’s like the Mafia. Figure out where it starts and where it ends.

That’s what we did. I have a client, WeatherBug, who you know is a sponsor here, and we are constantly monitoring the chatter in the “bloggersphere.” And we found this gentleman who writes a blog on weather and he said WeatherBug rocks. And I had my team reach out to this person and engage him in a conversation.

The next step is to listen. Seek out honest feedback. You may already do this now, but the key is that you need to do this in real time, through as many channels as you can. Listen to their blogs, read their blogs.

And don’t keep this knowledge to yourself. This is key. Let everyone inside and outside of your company have access to what customers are saying. Give them a voice. Be transparent. That might be hard for a lot of folks to swallow here -- saying "Well, we really don’t want the bad with the good." But by having the bad out there, you have an opportunity in the next step to engage them and discuss, and perhaps change their opinions.

Ask your customers for their best ideas. Use your site to transparently capture and respond. And solicit these types of things. Solicit … ask them for their success stories -- "How are you using our product? What kind of value are you getting from it? What kind of features would you like to see in the next version of our product? Do you have any issues? What kinds of commonalities are out there, among the different people that are constituents?"

And that’s what we did here again with WeatherBug. They have a blog and they said, please send us your stories. And they came in by dozens and hundreds submitting their stories about how to use the product; about what they’re seeing with weather; about questions they had. And the consumers were very thrilled to have a voice.

The next step is to engage.

Jump in and talk with, not to, your audiences. Communicate through the channels they’re using to share. Be part of that team stream. Put yourself at eye level with your customers. And talk to them in a human voice.

Show the human side of your company. Get people who maybe are not at the top, maybe are the customer-facing employees -- it’s the customer service reps, the product managers, everybody in your company you know, maybe not the execs -- talking to consumers.

This is really important: Always be yourself. Be transparent. Don’t try to be something you’re not. Don’t create a fake blog. Don’t create a blog for a character that you have in an advertisement. Just be human.

Launch blogs. Okay. This is about getting at eye level. Showcase your talent. If you don’t want to launch your own blog, find one of these influencers that's out there and ask them to write one for you. They’ll be thrilled. Link to your evangelists and even to their vigilantes on your blogs.

Leave comments on your customer’s blogs. Go out there and find people who are writing about you and say, "hey, I’m listening … I’m listening to what you have to say and I care." They’ll be so surprised to hear from you.

Share your knowledge. Help consumers maximize their experience. One of the greatest uses of blogs is to launch a tip blog where somebody like your product manager or marketing manager writes a blog with tips on how to use and maximize use for your product. Customers will just love that. They can go there again and again and again to hear from a human voice on how to maximize the use of that product.

Sign bloggers to endorsement deals. Find the bloggers out there, the ones that really are influential, who are willing to perhaps be part of your ad campaigns, and sign them to deals -- again that's low cost.

Advertise on blogs or underwrite their pod casts. If you find a blogger that is credible and has a voice, and has a following, why not advertise there -- small dollars for you is big dollars for them.

And build campaigns around your evangelists. When you find your customer evangelists, interview them. Get your PR teams talking to them and enroll them into how you do media.

So here’s an example of “engage.” We have a blog for WeatherBug -- a groundhog blog -- again, that shows the human side of the WeatherBug company.

And the last step is to empower.

Encourage your customers to shepherd the message. Have them go out there and preach to the crowd. Give them access to the tools that make it easy for them to spread the gospel. Create community. Bring like-minded people together, both offline and online. Give your customers a place to write a blog.

Create a cause. Find out what stirs your customers; what gets them excited; what gets their juices flowing. Latch onto this, and work together.

Monday: Examples and resources.