Holtz Communications + Technology

While reports continue to flood out of the business world of companies blocking employee access to online venues—notably social media and especially social networks—Serena Software has taken the opposite approach, actively encouraging employees to network with each other on Facebook. Serena’s CEO, Jeremy Burton, has written about his philosophy for ZDNet Asia; the company even issued a press release about it.

In this exclusive…

When conversation turns to companies that have embraced social media, Electrolux isn’t one of the names that comes up. However, Richard Gatarski sent me a note about a post he wrote on the launch today of Electrolux’s social media newsroom.

Richard liked the Swedish kitchen appliance company’s newsroom but had a few observations about ways it could be improved. The single comment to the post (as…

Kevin Dugan tagged me on the MediaSnackers meme, a concept I’ve been digesting (pun fully intended) before juping into well-covered territory. The question: How do you respect MediaSnackers?

By way of background, Jeremiah Owyang started the meme on October 24 by presenting the video from the MediaSnackers site and offering a terse definition:

What???s a mediasnacker? Folks who consume small bits of information, data…

I’m not sure I get Gary Goldhammer’s gripe with Ragan Communications’ adoption of social media. In his “Below the Fold” blog, Gary writes,

Social Media is Not Just About a Set of Tools ??? Will someone please tell this to Ragan and PRSA? Please, before they hurt somebody? It???s often those who profess to know the future that turn out to be the most shortsighted.

I…

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

I posted a couple days ago about the lack of a comprehensive calendar of conferences, seminars, and workshops addressing new/social media, despite the fact that there are so many of these that it’s impossible to keep up. Constantin Basturea noted that there’s an “Upcoming Conferences” page in the Resources section of The New PR wiki. I honestly wasn’t aware of it—there was no link to it on the wiki’s…