Holtz Communications + Technology

I always find it interesting when someone cites the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights—the first 10 amendments to the Constitution—when discussing an action taken by a private organization.

That was the case today in a comment responding to a post by online craft consignment site Etsy, which revised its product policies in response to ongoing criticism aimed at greeting…

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…

Last week I reacted to the notion that moderating blog comments is a fast path to annoying your readers. Comments to the post leaned toward moderation, but several—including some from people I respect deeply—opposed moderation on personal blogs, suggesting it’s up to the blogger to check comments frequently and weed out the spam. By allowing comments to appear instantly, commenters are happy while…

Legal writing is, almost by definition, cold and impersonal. In the silo’d structure of most organizations, the lawyers perform the tasks expected of them, protecting the organization from risk the way they were taught in law school. The same icy legalese is crafted whether the issue is suing for trademark infringement or finalizing a contract.

In today’s environment of many-to-many engagement, corporate legal…

Repent, all ye sinners. The end of the Web is nigh.

Well, okay, that may be a bit extreme. But when you consider that links are the Web’s foundation, a disturbing trend doesn’t bode well at all.

Consider these two news items:

• U.S. appeals court judge Richard Posner wrote last month that expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted material, or to bar…

In the countless battles between communicators and corporate attorneys over what to say in response to reputation-threatening situations, the lawyers’ advice to say nothing (or little) usually prevails.

The result is often disastrous for the organization, but CEOs and senior leaders presume that mitigation of legal risk is of paramount concern. Industry pundits often agree, arguing that corporations are legal entities, requiring…