Holtz Communications + Technology

Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz will host a special live call-in edition of “For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report” this Saturday, February 9, at 10 a.m. Pacific, (1 p.m. Eastern and 6 p.m. GMT).

The call-in episode will focus on the blurring of the lines between internal and external communications. If you work in external PR, how do employees of your (or…

The habit of communicating via broadcast is hard to break. Even as some companies embrace the ethos of social media, they employ broadcast models in their efforts to participate in it. Facebook apps, for example, are a means of injecting a message into a medium used primarily for conversation. There’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, a study from the American…

Gartner analysts are warning companies to be wary of investing in internal social networking. With Facebook poised to license its developer platform and several companies offering proprietary intranet-based social networking applications, Gartner’s analysts caution that social networking isn’t mature enough to warrant status as a critical business tool. VoiP and instant messaging are more beneficial, they say.

Over at IBM, the Blue Pages were…

In July 2007, Microsoft introduced Academy Mobile, an internal social computing initiative aimed at creating a knowledge sharing environment among employees through the use of videocasts and podcasts.

Academy Mobile is the latest in a series of online learning initiatives developed within the Enterprise Partner Group at Microsoft where employees can create, watch, listen and share videocasts or podcasts with peers;…

The issue of anonymous reader comments continues to perplex Ragan Communications editors, per Steve Crescenzo’s article. But of even greater concern to me is the comment to Steve’s article left by internal communications icon Roger D’Aprix:

How sad that grown men and women are unable to own their words or restrain their emotions. It’s especially sad that they are so-called ‘communicators.’ And people want to bring this sort of…

Forrester Research recently released a case study chronicling the implementation of blogs as an enterprise communication tool at 150-year-old financial services company Northwestern Mutual. The blogs, intended to drive a change to the organization’s culture, instead resulted in increased productivity as most of the employees starting blogs focused them on project management.

The social media platform Northwestern Mutual implemented is from