Just a thought, but have any of your PR practitioners ever used Yahoo! Answers? That's Yahoo's new ask-the-community tool. I believe that this could be a very good platform for PRs to gauge public perception of products, companies, trends, etc. Questions must be phrased in a way that people wouldn't mind answering, of course.
Lots of prominent people including Dr Steven Hawking and U2's Bono have made headlines asking questions already. There's no guarantee the quality of the responses, but then again, Yahoo is by far the biggest community aggregator on the Internet, so this is your best shot.
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