I think it depends a bit on disclosure. If you have a podcast that is driving an agenda and you are completely open about it, and disclose in an obvious manner then it is not a nefarious cast. If it contains no useful content then it is really just an ad.
Where do we draw the line in the no-mans land between content and advertising. What new media forms are delivering at the moment are a new way to get information. Some of the best information resides in the minds and organisations of those that have their own agendas. If we want to get access to that information we need to be flexible to some extent on how inclusive we are.
As with many things there is no 100% correct answer, but a balancing act between different cost-benefit spectrums. In this case the spectrum of information versus the spectrum of agenda (pure information sharing to pure marketing). How much marketing do we tolerate for how much good information? And even once we answer this question how do we police it? What Todd is doing with Bluberry is a good example of good policing by the company at the choke point, creating policy, enforcing policy and presumably amending policy as the environment changes.
To give you an example of the grey area. The company I work for produces a decent amount of podcasts. They are highly marketing based and discuss our products and how they can be used. They do contain information but it is moderately biased towards our products. These podcasts are only available for download on our own corporate website though, so there is no way to stumble upon them and believe they are anything but what they are. The company has decided to not even create and iTunes channel for these for fear that it might look like gorilla marketing. This is not grey yet.
The grey part is that we are considering putting together a more generic podcast series that discusses the core technology we deal with in a more generic form. These will be designed to be a training guide for the particular technology(ies) and are intended to be as non-specific to our specific products as we can possibly make them. The idea is for them to be a training primer for the technology as it is a technology not generally well understood.
Our intentions are not completely altruistic, we expect that increasing the level and quality of information will
- reduce our support costs
- help promote our company as the people to turn to for advice on this technology
- contain reference to our company as a header and trailer ad (i.e. this cast bought to you by x)
- give us some positive brand impact.
The question we are now asking internally, do we release this to podcast directories so it can be more easily found by people that would benefit from the information? It is only a small subset of our customers that will find this information on our own website, and only a smaller portion of them that would check the site regularly.
So what do the GNC crew think is the answer, keep what we believe will be good, broadly useful information to ourselves, or release that information to the public even though it has an inherent agenda?
