Holtz Communications + Technology

My friend Steve Crescenzo’s latest post on IABC’s Communication World blog is a straightforward social media 101 treatise. Steve cautions communicators to develop a strategy before launching into social media: “Slow down,” Steve writes. “Back up. Be a communicator, not a Social Media Evangelist. Some Social Media will makes sense for your organization; many others will not.”

Like Steve, I’m an advocate of strategizing your organization’s use…

Search Engine Optimization—SEO—is critical. Your content won’t influence anything if people can’t find it.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I have to ask: Does absolutely every nugget of online content need to be optimized for search?

I just finished delivering the morning keynote at a healthcare conference focusing on social media. During the Q&A, I was asked about the deleterious affect…

Type “san francisco crime” into Google and Google returns over 32 million results. There are pages from SFgov.org that lead to SFPD crime maps, news results, interactive sites, wikipedia listings, blogs, crime watch information, victims pages and more. Lots more. Google does exactly what it’s supposed to do: It returns these 32 million-plus pages in an order based on placement of keywords and the…

These things are true:

• If your website domain isn’t instantly intuitive, people will go to a search engine to find you
• If people are looking for companies that do what your company does, they will go to a search engine to find you
• As people conduct searches about your organization, they’ll find what has risen to the top, whether it’s positive or negative
• With increasing regularity,…

With no announcement I can find, Google has removed the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of Google News searches. Instead, at the bottom of each results page, there are four “Stay up to date on these results” options, none of which accommodate RSS—even their own Google Reader.

There has been some chatter lately about the death of RSS, but it has been greatly…

I’m feeling pretty bad for Robert Scoble.

Last weekend, Robert released a series of video brain dumps that explained why he thinks “Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook are going to kick Google‘s butt in four years.” Since then, he’s been the subject of some scathing critiques that not only point out the technological flaws in his argument but do so in an unnecessarily personal way.

• Danny…