Holtz Communications + Technology

For anyone with an opinion about corporate blogging, the big news this week was IBM’s dynamic step into the blogosphere with their initiative to enable employee blogging and making publicly available their detailed employee blogging guidelines.

In this special edition of For Immediate Release podcast interviews, Shel and Neville enjoyed a 53-minute conversation with Mike Wing, IBM’s Vice President Strategic Communications, about the big…

Content summary: Listeners’ comments (on IBM’s blogging guidelines; on a great podcast for marketers and PRs who want a tech twist with their communication); the case of the computer lock and the toilet roll; communicators in government and layers of bureaucracy; blogs and creating consumer trust; in communication, as always, the audience is in charge; may the force be with you for…

Thank God for Constantin Basturea’s list of CEO bloggers on his NewPR wiki.TheNewPR Wiki. (While we’re at it, thank God for everything Constantin does for the rest of us.) Sadly, the list did me no good when a colleague and sometime client asked me for examples of CEOs who are blogging to employees on their companies’ intranets.

“Well,” I said, “there’s Paul Otellini at Intel, and then, um,…

In the wake of IBM’s announcement that the company is encouraging its 300,000-plus employees to blog externally, Mike Wing—IBM’s vice president of communication strategy—will be our guest on a special interview segment of “For Immediate Release” set for this Friday, May 20. Neville Hobson and I will interview Mike about the blogging initiative, the company’s use of a wiki (instead of its own Notes platform) to develop…

A letter to Business Week in response to the magazine’s cover story on blogging asks, “Is this really what we want our corporate leaders spending hours a day doing?”

Yes. Definitely.

In thinking this through, it’s important to put a corporate leader’s blogging efforts in context. Step back from the new technology and all the attention the software gets and consider what blogging is:

Communication.

Ask…

Among the letters Business Week received in response to its cover story on blogging came this one: “What you nail is that blogs have become a killer app for public relations and marketing. But it’s less clear that they are effective for internal communications. For that, the blog format is very much overhyped.”

I’ve been engaged in employee communication for 28 years. When I started as an…