Holtz Communications + Technology

I recently heard a well-known online figure denounce the use of social media as a business strategy, insisting instead that social media will kill your brand. All you need for a successful business, he said, is a good product, solid customer service and a domain.

There are so many problems with this it’s hard to know where to begin. I could start with…

A debate several years ago, during blogging’s heyday, centered on the wisdom of introducing “character blogs.” These aren’t fake blogs. They’re very transparent in their use of a fictional character as the blogger. Some experts defended the practice while others insisted that it could never be a good idea. I fell somewhere in the middle, advising against them in nearly all instances but acknowledging…

I am seriously conflicted about how to feel about Sprout‘s decision to “sunset” its consumer widget-building software-as-a-service tool, Sprout Builder.

By “sunset,” of course, Sprout means “kill.” For a startup, they’ve certainly learned the corporate art of doubletalk.

I’ve been raving about Sprout Builder since its debut. Before Sprout Builder, dynamic, multimedia widgets were a costly undertaking requiring programming expertise. Sprout Builder made it drop-dead easy for anybody to create one and…

Once the Super Bowl—the most-viewed television program of all time—ended, 38.6 million people (about 36% of the Super Bowl audience) stuck around for the premiere of CBS’s new “reality” show, “Undercover Boss.”

In case you’ve just emerged from a coma and aren’t aware of the show, the premise is simple: Company leaders go undercover on the front lines of their companies to discover what it’s really like to do the heavy…

Warning: Lost post follows

Back in 1995, “Snow Crash” author Neal Stephenson teamed up with his uncle George Jewsbury under the pseudonym Stephen Bury to produce a potboiler titled “Interface.” The premise: A presidential candidate suffers a stroke and has a chip implanted in his brain. The chip features a wireless connection to feedback from thousands of watch-like devices distributed to a representative sample…

Last Tuesday, I led a Ragan Communications webinar on the state of the communications profession and where the business is headed. There wasn’t enough time to answer everyone’s question in the time allotted, so I invited questions by email and promised to post them, along with my answers, here so they’d be available to everyone who attended. Here’s what I got and how I answered…