Holtz Communications + Technology

Image (c) Can Stock PhotoDid you miss me last week? The Brazil trip turned into a longer stay than I planned, thanks to airport closures due to Hurricane Isaac. But I’m back, so let’s wrap the week! This is my (mostly) weekly review of items that crossed my newsfeeds over the last seven days that are interesting enough to report but didn’t…

Image (c) CanStockPhotoI’m sorry I missed last week’s Wrap—I was in Brazil (even longer than I expected; my flight home was cancelled due to Tropical Storm Isaac, leaving me in Sao Paulo two days longer than planned). But I’m back with my weekly review of stories from the last week I found in my feeds and thought were interesting or important enough to share with…

Progresso, the General Mills-owned soup brand, has finally responded to a growing chorus of customer calls for the company to end its use of BPA in its cans. They have responded, that is, if copying and pasting a canned (no pun intended) statement is a response.\

I learned about the issue when Paul Gillin called my attention to it as a…

Business, brand and product literacy represent fertile ground for internal communicators. Increasingly, employees know their own jobs and the products on which they work, but aren’t well-versed in other parts of the company or products they don’t work on. In an effort to improve product literacy—which arose mainly from employees’ own requests—Frito-Lay communicators Michael Karle and Joe Flowers developed a website that provides all the…

During one of the breaks during my daylong workshop in New Zealand, I sat down with Tom Pullar-Strecker, IT editor at the Dominion Post. We chatted about one of the workshop themes, the idea that companies have to think like publishers. Part of the discussion turned to brand journalism.

That wound up as the focus of Pullar-Strecker’s article, which is mostly accurate in…

Call it what you will: content marketing, content strategy, brand journalism, braided journalism or just thinking like a publisher. Whatever you call it, just don’t call it marketing.

I’ve been making this point—one I thought was fairly benign and obvious—to clients and at conferences and workshops where I speak. But when a participant in my workshop in Sydney last week tweeted the sentiment, it got a…