By Jim Sinkinson, Publisher, Bulldog Reporter

The Daily 'Dog caught up with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales before his keynote presentation at Hult International School of Business in San Francisco last week to ask him about PR's access to Wikipedia, Wikipedia's role in the SOPA/PIPA copyright protection controversy, and Wales's latest venture, the for-profit Wikia. Eleven-year-old Wikipedia is now the Web's fifth largest website, with some 460 million unique visitors a month. Here are some of the answers Wales gave us:

Many PR people perceive that Wikipedia is an insider's club, where some companies have access and others don't — that it's not a level playing field. How true is that in your opinion?

JW: That's not accurate. We want to present better protocols, and I know there has been confusion around access. But we're intending to get something out about best practices. If you're having trouble, just send us an email — info@wikipedia.com — or visit the WikiProject discussion and let us know. But you've got to be respectful and not confrontational. (Editor's note: "A WikiProject is a group of editors that collaborate on encyclopedic work at the collection of pages devoted to the management of a specific topics or family of topics within Wikipedia." Reach any article's discussion section using the Talk tab.)

What can a PR person do if false information is posted about a company or a personality?

JW: Anytime there's false information, just post it to the discussion page. We have people monitoring them, and their response is pretty fast. If it's a person, you want to go to the Biographies of Living Persons notice board. The bios are called BLPs. You can go to the article talk page or just write to info@wikipedia.org. Our editors will become an advocate for anyone with a complaint or a problem.

By Chad Park, Executive Director, The Natural Step Canada

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is outdated and counterproductive to successful enterprise and the global sustainability imperative.

CSR encourages us to incorporate environmental and social considerations into a business-as-usual scenario. This is the triple-bottom-line approach and is often depicted with three overlapping circles representing economy, society, and environment.

This is a flawed paradigm.

In fact, economy, society, and environment are not three equal parts, but function like nested eggs. The economy occurs within human society, which in turn exists within the natural environment. The natural capital provided by the Earth sustains everything that exists within it. Accordingly, almost every global mega-trend tells us that without a radical transformation of the way we conduct business, a wide variety of risks and pressures will continue to harm profitability across the board.

In the spotlight: Jeff Mustard, President, The Bamboo Agency

Jeff Mustard, president of The Bamboo Agency (www.TheBambooAgency.com) and veteran public relations professional, provides an interesting, insightful and illuminating peek behind the curtain of the Costa Concordia ship disaster. While the Costa Concordia lay capsized off the Italian coast of Coglio, the media frenzy commenced to swirl around the ship's Captain Francesco Schettino, Carnival Cruise Lines, (Costa's Parent Company) and the cruise industry at large. In his unique and in-depth 12-page report — produced less than 100 hours after the Costa Concordia made headlines — Mustard outlines the media issues and strategies that were employed by Carnival's Crisis Communications team to prevent cruise-loving consumers from sinking Carnival as a company and the cruise industry at large. Mustard examines the company's press statements, deconstructs them from a "messaging" point of view, observes how the media portrayed Carnival in its coverage of the crisis and as importantly, follows the company's stock performance on its first day of trading after the ship sank. Mustard produced a four-part case study comprising 63 pages and nearly 30,000 words examining the global crisis incident in a two-week period from when the Costa Concordia first called "Mayday" to Italian Authorities, at 10:00 PM, the evening of Friday 13th.

SocialFlow (www.socialflow.com), a social media content optimization platform, has announced the public availability of the SocialFlow Optimized Publisher for brands and businesses of all sizes. Using applied mathematics and language analysis to understand audiences, topics, attention and engagement on the real-time social graph, the Optimized Publisher lets businesses know and leverage the precise value of each piece of content they publish. Through access to the Twitter and Facebook data streams, SocialFlow's research team has shown that language — not demographics or so-called "influencer" status — is the best predictor of affinity and action. In internationally recognized studies of millions of social media messages, SocialFlow has offered groundbreaking insight into the spread of information on social networks through the proprietary scoring capability that powers the Optimized Publisher. SocialFlow is able to help businesses grasp the meaning of data on the ever-changing social graph, leading the way to a new perception of the value of language in real time. "Businesses can't just rely on crossing their fingers and hoping for the best on social networks like Twitter and Facebook," said Frank Speiser, CEO and co-founder of SocialFlow, in a news release. "As the business value of social media has increased, so has the urgency to create intelligent tools that can respond to split-second shifts and growing audiences. SocialFlow's Optimized Publisher uses the power of predictive analytics and technology to remove the time-consuming guesswork from social media strategies. Now brand managers and publishers can use their time to focus on creating the unique and engaging content their audiences require."

By Jim Bucci

Stephen Wampler had an audacious goal. He wanted to climb Yosemite National Park's El Capitan Mountain — a mountain twice as high as the Empire State Building. Born with cerebral palsy and wheelchair-bound, Wampler's climb would help raise $2 million for his foundation that provides summer camp options for kids with physical disabilities. Embarking on such an arduous and dangerous journey would also serve as an inspirational challenge to disabled children worldwide — no goal is too tall.

Before Wampler could climb, he needed to learn how to climb and solve his fear of heights.

After spending one year training at Coronado Climbing Center, learning how to use a system of ropes to climb, Wampler became the first person with cerebral palsy to reach the summit of "El Cap" in September of 2010. Though his nemesis — fear of heights — crept in halfway up the climb, Wampler persisted to the top, pulling himself up 20,000 times in six days — the equivalent of doing 20,000 pull-ups. Wampler hauled himself up the mountain four to six inches at a time, doing pull-up after pull-up in the bright Yosemite sun.

After completing his journey, Wampler promptly "retired" from climbing—El Capitan to be his first and only mountain.

Approached by ESET, a San Diego-based Internet security company and corporate sponsor of the climb, Schwartz Communications came aboard to construct a PR strategy to support Wampler's climb and fundraising campaign.