Holtz Communications + Technology

My presentation this morning at the IABC 2010 World Conference expanded on my Stop Blocking theme, articulating the rationale for providing open access to social networks for employees but going a step beyond, identifying the value that can be extracted—ethically, authentically and transparently—from those networks by organizations smart enough to establish supporting models and processes.

What follows is the speaker support, developed in Prezi…

Dear Sir or Madam:

I understand your fears and worries. I really do. It’s risky out there where employees may say something they shouldn’t that brings the wrath of a regulatory agency upon your head, where links from Facebook pages lead to sites that exist solely to infect your network, where employees seem to be doing anything but the work you’re paying them to do.

And…

I currently have 105 pending friend requests on Facebook and a similar number awaiting action on LinkedIn. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with these, since I have no idea who any of them are.

I’ve decided, reluctantly, to simply delete them all.

I’m happy to connect with people whose names I don’t instantly recognize as long as I know what the link is. Of…

At first, I shrugged off the semi-literate comment left to one of my posts over on Stop Blocking, the site I started to advocate for reasonable employee access to the Net, and particularly to social media sites.

The post to which “reason,” as he called himself left a comment reported on a study that showed 54% of companies were blocking access. Here’s his…

For days, department members had ignored emails from a colleague asking for their input on a business matter. This was no overt act of rebellion against the sender of the email. In fact, she was well-liked. Instead, the request got lost in the avalanche of email employees received, or it represented yet another to-do added to an already-daunting list, or…

It’s becoming a litany.

In a meeting or during a presentation, somebody—usually an HR rep or recruiter—will tell me how many candidates she has rejected based on something she saw on the candidate’s Facebook or MySpace profile. In every case, it has been something along the lines of a photo taken during a party at college. My response: “If your employer knew what you did during college,…