There’s something special about a guy who isn’t a rock star yet has three times the Twitter followers of Bob Dylan.  He’s not a deep-pocketed electronics retailer, yet his social media presence dwarfs Best Buy.

Jeremiah Owyang is an influencer in Web strategy, a futurist, a gadfly and — most important of all — someone who listens, studies, engages and shares.  A partner in the newly formed consulting firm Altimeter Group, Owyang earned his nearly 60,000 followers the hard way.

Since I dived into the social web after leaving PR Newswire, I found that Owyang’s Forrester research reports provided a well-grounded reality check that validated fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, marketing methodologies and the demand for new PR and marcom tools.  He’s routinely quoted by CMOs during conferences and, unlike many celebrities, @jowyang almost always tweets back immediately.

During my recent visit to Altimeter Group’s new headquarters in San Mateo, California, Owyang showed no signs of being jet-lagged, despite returning less than a day earlier from one of his frequent overseas speeches.  He also demonstrated keen knowledge of an increasingly confusing vendor community supplying social media monitoring, analysis and curation tools.

To illustrate why the public relations industry should familiarize itself with social customer relationship management systems, Owyang shared an anecdote about how appliance maker Whirlpool  failed to appease a disgruntled customer, and the damage it caused due to that customer’s ability to influence millions through social media.

“Customers do not care what department you’re in,” said Owyang, predicting that some forward-thinking companies will take on the challenge of building smart systems that inform Support, PR, Marketing, Product Development and offer a single view of the customer no matter where they touch the company.

I am aware of one large food manufacturer whose PR department is heading into the new year with amped up monitoring capabilities and a plan to pipe real-time data into their customer service call centers.  If the readers of PounceNow are aware of organizations where PR is embracing the challenge, please comment on this post.

I don’t expect diversity in the New York supermarket business.  Rightly or wrongly, I have long associated chains like D’Agostino and Gristede’s as places managed by brawny Italian-American men.

In the public relations professions, the spotlight has been shining on the lack of adequate representation by non-male, non-white personnel for quite some time.  Similar criticism — and in some cases, litigation — has been lodged against the advertising and financial services industries.

But the world has changed since Don Draper types ruled on Madison Avenue, right?  Surely, the next generation of technology-driven marketing services would be led by people who more closely resemble those who live in our global communities where our clients sell their wares.

If the speakers and attendees at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in suburban Boston were an accurate sampling of who’s guiding us through the transformation from command-and-control “push” marketing to online and offline consumer “engagement” by brands, the answer is no.  The vast majority of those behind the books, speeches, opinions, videos and business models showcased at #IMS09 were  white males, mainly in their 30s and 40s.

One exception was Candace Fleming, CEO of the social media analytics platform Crimson Hexagon.  Another was Tina Hoang, whose Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm was trolling the event for companies to back.

While at PR Newswire,  where I worked from 1989 until recently, one of our overarching goals was building a healthy corporate culture and products that represented the needs of our communities.  Key to our success was attracting and retaining talent of all shapes, sizes, colors, orientations, religions and ethnicities.  The many postage stamp-sized images of my former PRN colleagues I see on Facebook each day confirms that we made plenty of progress.

Why is this important?

Census data from 2008 shows 54% of the U.S. population will be 54 percent minority groups — that is “everyone except non-Hispanic, single-race whites” — by the mid-21st century.  Professions that continue to rely on pale, male and stale people, practices and ideas are much more likely to be irrelevant.

One recent research paper on the topic, Elizabeth L. Toth’s  “Diversity and Public Relations Practice,” outlined the challenge for our profession.  Organizations like the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute for Public Relations have dedicated resources to address the issue.  But traditional PR agencies and corporate communications functions are morphing into new entities so quickly, it’s questionable how much impact the longtime industry standard bearers will have influencing the fledgling inbound marketing field.

There is  plenty of wildly successful marketing work being done in Africa, Asia, Europe and in the Americas using digital tools and creative  ideas from people who have never written a book or proclaimed themselves social media experts.  Events like the the trends-and-technologies Pop!Tech conference, in Camden, Maine, Oct. 21-24, have a broad roster of philanthropic doers who are glad to share their successes and failures with PR and marketing pros who want to learn new skills.

For people without thousands of dollars to spend on conferences like Pop!Tech and TED, last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit was well worth the time and investment.  I’d love to see next year’s event held in Indonesia, Argentina or Tunisia.  If not there, at least invite some of their digital marketing superstars to visit Boston.

The whole concept of a sabbatical is foreign to those of us who haven’t worked in academia. For someone who bought his first police scanner at age 14 and who has measured time in news cycles ever since, taking a pause to refresh was heresy.

Yet I found myself on “garden leave” – the term the British use to describe the time a departing executive is dormant before getting back to work –for much of 2009. The irony is that the only thing resembling a garden at our New York condo is a window box. Despite the lack of a plot to plant, I can honestly say the last few months have been exhilarating.

While I thought my work-life balance was in check before, now I actually know my daughters’ shoe sizes and the menu at the soup kitchen where my wife, Maureen, cooks gourmet meals three days a week. I also experienced the joy of mentoring two recent City University graduates, and helping low-income women gain self-sufficiency through a highly effective program called First Step.

On the networking front, I have been awed by all the brilliant entrepreneurs who are introducing fascinating and disruptive ways to do tasks that have long confounded marketing and PR pros. In private equity and venture capital, I have new respect for the discipline and guts it takes to find, fund and execute. And on the customer desktop, I share your pain that it’s possible to order a pizza through your Tivo but automating a MarCom department remains but a dream.

Today, as I prepare to begin a new chapter as a board member and vice chairman of dna13, I want to thank the many friends, peers and complete strangers who embodied the very spirit of social networking by brainstorming, opening their Rolodexes and challenging my preconceived notions about how PR, media, marketing and sales are intersecting, and the role that technology will play in that convergence.

Most people have never heard of dna13. Compared to an entrenched giant like PR Newswire, this Ottawa-based software company is very, very small. Yet dna13 is a wonderful example of how someone who’s an expert in his job – dna13 founder Chris Johnson worked in corporate communications for Bell Canada – can bring a fresh solution to market and watch it grow.

What does dna13 do? In short, users of dna13 software can listen to what is being said about their company across all channels — print, major market TV, online and social media. When the SM (social media) or MSM (mainstream media) hits the fan, the dna13 platform has cool permissioning features so subscribers can securely align team members to plan the synchronized delivery of messages. (Note: those who love managing their 500+ Google Alerts, emailing multiple “track changes” documents to their CEO, or plugging their good, bad and neutral hits into a spreadsheet should not look at dna13.)

dna13 is moving from entrepreneurial to growth phase. Because it’s set up in the Software-as-a-Service model, product development is nimble. I have never seen a better technology organization – moving from white board to production in days and weeks rather than months and years.

My new colleagues include seasoned sales, marketing and product people, super-capable COO Kevin O’Neil, as well as board support from software veteran Howard Gwin (PeopleSoft, IBM, Pivotal), Tom Birch of Propulsion Ventures, Inc. and Pierre-Andre Meunier of Celtic House Venture Partners.

To all those who invited me into their homes, offices, industry events and social networks during my transition, please know that I’m happy to repay the favor. Just say the word.