Holtz Communications + Technology

Back in 2005, when IBM first encouraged its employees to blog publicly about their work, the company explained the initiative in part by noting that no marketing campaign could evangelize the company’s work better than its own employees.

In recent years, it has become more and more common for organizations to find ways to get employees into the social media space to…

I work in public relations.

In one form or another, I’ve worked in PR for the last 34 years. It’s a profession I love. It’s an outlet for creative expression. It lets me see projects through to completion and assess their effectiveness.

In my three-and-almost-a-half decades in PR, I’ve met thousands of dedicated professionals who also work in communications. I’ve been fortunate to work with many of them.

I…

One of the more distressing aspects of the recent Duke Nukem Forever dustup had nothing to do with Jim Redner‘s ill-advised tweet threatening to blacklist those who penned what he deemed particularly savage negative reviews.

Between Redner (who lost his biggest client as a result), New Media Strategies (which was fired from the Chrysler account over a similarly misguided tweet), former New York…

The use of software to automate the deployment of armies of fake social media accounts is, to me, the most disturbing trend in the social space. It’s disturbing on its face but even moreso because public affairs organizations are among the most likely to supply these services. And few would be surprised to find PR practitioners behind such dubious efforts.

I don’t personally…

For some time now, I’ve been advancing the idea that hiring a warm body to fill a vacancy is no longer a viable staffing strategy. Organizations need to hire people they feel they can trust, since trust is the foundation of employee engagement. When arguing against blocking employee access to social media, I point out that it sends the same message to…

Andrea Weckerle has fulfilled a longtime ambition by establishing CiviliNation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “foster an online culture where every person can freely participate in a democratic, open, rational and truth-based exchange of ideas and information, without fear or threat of being the target of unwarranted abuse, harassment, or lies.” In this FIR Interview, co-host Shel Holtz discusses with…