I had the pleasure of doing a radio show this past weekend with the guys over at Pundit Review. They have a weekly right-leaning radio program but with a very novel twist: most of their guests are prominent bloggers. They buy in to the concept that social media is influencing public opinion in some very profound ways and they make it a point to spotlight the people who are doing the influencing.

I was pleased to share much of the program with Glenn Reynolds’, whose Instapundit site needs no introduction. It’s the top political site on the Internet and Reynolds is an incredibly active blogger, posting 15 to 20 times some days and recently adding podcasts into the mix. He also just wrote a book about social media called An Army of Davids and somehow finds time for his day job as a law professor.

You can download a podcast of the program.

GlaxoSmithKline has turned its entire sales force into a public relations machine. The company has deputized its 8,000 sales people to go forth and spread the word about all the good things the pharmaceutical industry does. People are supposed to start with family members and expand the message through community gatherings and speeches. The story doesn’t mention blogs, but that would make sense, wouldn’t it?

What do you make of this idea. Do you trust your employees enough with your company message and positioning to send them out as PR ambassadors? Or does this idea give you the willies?

Google just launched a test of an Ajax-based website editor. Supposedly, this will let you create websites with a look-and-feel that mimics a native desktop application. Do you wonder why Microsoft is scared of these guys? Are you going to pay $90 for FrontPage if you can get comparable functionality for free?

Clayton Christensen has pointed out that high-end market leaders are always edged out by low-end competitors whose products are “good enough” but which make products available to large new audiences. Examples include off-the-rack clothing, transistor radios, Toyotas, Dell PCs, VOIP phone services, etc. Google is getting to be very good at “good enough.”

The Chicago Tribune has a story that says there are 27,000 podcasts on the Internet, which is double the number that was quoted to me by the people at Podshow last month. This story talks about the passion of the podcasters, but there’s still that tricky issue of how to make money. Outside of Mommycast and perhaps a few others, no one’s figured out how to crack that code yet.

The University of Arizona is podcasting some lectures. If they had had this stuff when I was in school, there’s no way I ever woulda made one of those 8 a.m. classes :-).

No posts for a week. Shame on me! But I’ve been rebuilding my website, you see, and writing a newsletter.

Speaking of which, I got around to writing down more detail on the GM Fastlane Podcasts and the Whirlpool American Family podcasts based on my interviews with the people responsible for both. These are innovative uses of the medium and should be an example to others.

You can read the detailed account here.

I’ve also expanded my list of podcasting resources for marketers. Read it here.

Edelman, the giant global PR firm, has gone and hired Steve Rubel, whose Micro Persuasion is considered the number one advertising blog on the Web. This is a big endorsement for word-of-mouth marketing as a legitimate communications channel. This Ad Age piece (registration required) has more about the Rubel hire and also mentions that Weber Shandwick has hired Jeremy Pepper, author of the Pop! PR Jots blog, as group manager in its San Francisco office.

The Boston Globe has a very well-reported two-part series on Wikipedia this week and it’s none too complimentary about the online reference source.

David Mehegan, who’s one of the best reporters at the Globe, documents the abuses that have emerged since Wikipedia achieved cult status last year. He goes beyond the endlessly cited John Siegenthaler case and talks about the real doubts that serious scholars have about the reliability of information in Wikipedia. Those doubts are based on real experience, too. The article raises questions about whether you can believe anything you read there, on the supposition that even a 5% inaccuracy rate is enough to cast doubt about the validity of the entire site.

I’m a huge Wikipedia fan but I also recognize that these kinds of problems are an inevitable consequence of success. No one paid attention when Wikipedia was the 100th most popular website. Now that it’s bigger than AOL, the vandals are crawling out of the woodwork.

Wikipedia’s reliability problems can be solved but it will probably require some sort of registration/identification system to verify accountability, if not accuracy. The Wikimedia Foundation has an important task ahead trying to figure this out. But they will figure it out. Wikipedia has been perhaps the most prominent example of the power of social media and a lot of smart people will be helping it overcome this obstacle. Articles like the Globe‘s are important because they force change. Wikipedia will need to change constantly if it is to continue in the leadership role it has carved out for itself.

Michael Schrage, who’s one of my favorite tech columnists, has a column in CIO Magazine this week called Think Before you Blog. It makes an excellent point: that blogging by itself doesn’t necessarily enhance your image and can actually make you look bad. That’s why you have to think before you get online and start spouting.

A friend recently told me about an executive she knew who decided to get into blogging. He set up a blog on the company site and began raining invective on competitors and other players in his industry. He’d been told that bloggers were supposed to be controversial, but he apparently didn’t distinguish between being controversial and being an jerk. His blog was so obnoxious that it became a joke and an embarrassment inside the company. No one wanted to be around him. Only he thought he was doing the company a favor. The company didn’t. He was fired last December.

Blogging is about having something to say, not about insulting people.

I rarely take PR people to task for their tactics because I have a lot of respect for their profession and I understand the difficulty of generating good PR in this constantly changing media world. But I had an exchange with a PR person today (name withheld for obvious reasons) that provided a case study of what not to do in pitching a client.

I had posted an inquiry on PR Newswire’s very useful Profnet service seeking experts in corporate wikis. Of the many responses I received, one stood out as being completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. It was a pitch for a vertical market reseller. I responded to the PR person asking what the relevance of the pitch was to the topic at hand. Her response: “He is a software expert comfortable with addressing any tech topic.”

There are a couple of problems with that statement. For one thing, it’s an inherent contradiction. Anyone who believes that he or she is an expert in software is, by definition, not an expert in software. The field is far too vast, complex and specialized for anyone to be a general expert. On the contrary, this positioning makes the so-called expert look like an idiot because anyone who really knows software would know that general expertise is impossible to achieve.

Secondly, the response from the PR person made no attempt to relate the client’s expertise – whatever it is – to the topic I was writing about. In fact, it was clear to me that the PR person knew little, if anything, about wikis to begin with. In a situation like that, the PR rep should either research the topic or remain silent.

It’s very possible the client told his PR rep to position him as a general-purpose software expert. In that case, shame on the PR person. Her job was to help the client refine and focus his message, not spray it out to a general audience.