Transparency is a word that’s been kicked around a lot lately. But too much transparency is what got Edelman PR pro and blogebrity Steve Rubel kicked around this week, instead. An early Friday 13th comment about PC Magazine is fueling a potential boycott, as well as fulfilling what the PR world had feared about blogging.

When most companies decide to embrace social media, they usually use it as a vehicle to market new products and services, while at the same time seeking transparency. When Dell launched its IdeaStorm website, it departed from the normal “this is what we’re doing” message that most company blogs transmit.

Some believe that social media is one of the greatest viral marketing opportunities that has ever been presented. Others felt that it is a passing fad with no long-term future, and that businesses shouldn’t waste valuable time and manpower chasing the social media audience, to which they ascribe the perception of fickleness.

The relationship between a reporter and a company he (or she) is trying to write about is… well, complicated.

In some cases, it’s like two hostile nations trying to meet at Camp David, with each side compiling as much information — secret and otherwise — about their adversary, and each side trying to read between the lines to find out what the other party really meant. And sometimes those files get leaked, as they did in the case of Wired writer Fred Vogelstein.

The Long Tail: The Microsoft Memo: Some choose radical transparency, some have it thrust upon them Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief over at Wired, has a post out today that contains a massive email briefing by Microsoft’s PR firm Waggener Edstrom to a Microsoft executive about an interview with Wired Magazine.

Excuse my giddiness, but it’s definitely addictive to look at your keyword quality scores. You could have guessed them before by the assigned minimum bids, but these are fun to look at anyway:

Chris Anderson is on a roll about transparency  and six tactics for transparent media:

Shift Communications, home to social media advocate Todd Defren, was named agency of record for Novell, largely on the strength of Shift’s well-documented social media chops.

Last week, I wrote about Plaxo. You know, the impersonal emails you get from people asking you to update your contact info.

Shel and I had quite a robust discussion about the Wal-Mart and Edelman blogger relations campaign yesterday in show #119 of FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report.

Our little PR corner of the blogosphere is awash with opinion about the Wal-Mart/Edelman blogger outreach campaign stemming from a story in the New York Times on Tuesday.

With the EU refusing to be reasonable and the vultures circling the wagons, Microsoft has decided to try a weapon not normally found in their repetoire: transparency.

The 2006 annual meeting of the World Economic Forum begins today in Davos, Switzerland.

You only need to watch the PR (by Nathan Weinberg on the Inside Microsoft blog) that Microsoft received over the past week to understand that more transparency would be a good thing.

From his post on Ground Zero … This is a good time to draw the public relations community into the discussion.

Communicating on corporate responsibility doesn’t get more transparent than this. The Financial Times reports …

Companies everywhere talk a lot about how important their employees are and the contribution they make to overall success. But most companies don’t do this with the public openness and transparency demonstrated by CMS Cameron McKenna, an international law firm headquartered in London.

MediaPost reports that when MSN unveiled its new search engine, it put up a Web page, Inside MSN, which collects user comments on the product and posts them for all to see.

In yesterday’s edition of The Hobson & Holtz Report, our bi-weekly podcast show, Shel and I talked a little about IABC.

I’m not sure why, but there’s a weird trend sweeping through the blogosphere that when you think about it, takes us right back to the Geocities style hit counters and spinning logos days.

David Berlind takes the IT research industry to task in his latest post on the Media Transparency Channel …