After speaking with Lisa Padilla from Blog Talk Radio and Mike McGrath from Tacit Partners (also one of of the Silicon Valley chapter leaders) at last week’s Silicon Valley gathering, we decided to move forward with a new show for Social Media Club on Blog Talk Radio. In a short while, at 10am PST today on Friday August 31, we will be doing the first episode, with Robert Scoble as our special guest.

This show’s focus is Authenticity, Credibility and Authority in Social Media. From my personal perspective, I was thinking that the blessings of our tool’s capabilities for instant publishing have the potential to be a curse. Of course, I experienced a somewhat funnier (and slightly different) version of this double edged sword last week, showing up on Valleywag for a short video interview I did which was dubbed “Geeks Gone Wild“. In agreeing to do an on camera interview for a topic I was not prepared to really discuss, I ended up looking a bit silly, requiring me to do several hours of research and writing to clearly illuminate what I was trying to say. Of course video is completely different from writing, but it is an interesting parallel in some ways, especially in light of the need to do so much research in forming a coherent explanation of my point.

In the early days of the Web, when email was just going mainstream, we used to talk about the need to walk away for a bit after writing something important to consider what was written and come back to it with fresh eyes. I don’t hear that discussion all that often around Blogging - whether it is reporting, opinion or deeper thought pieces. While everyone is different, there are clearly many who think that the key to success in Blogging is publishing first and fast to “just get it out there”. I have had several discussions with Robert Scoble about this over the last couple years and I think this is going to be a great talk today, delving into the deeper issues surrounding the importance of “how we approach our use of social media tools”.

While we still need to figure things out with regards to the show’s format, I think this is going to be a great experiment and ongoing effort of the club. It begins to move forward one of my original visions for the club - finding ways for those of us who care about Social Media to collaborate globally in an effort to share best practices and learn from one another. We are approaching this show differently than others you may have seen out there - each episode will be hosted by a different person from one of our many Social Media Club chapters around the world… So in essence, the members of the club will be creating this show together!

So join us today for the Social Media Club Hour on Blog Talk Radio, and call in even to share your thoughts, we would love to hear from you!