Holtz Communications + Technology

Online community managers often find themselves in need of a forum for relating community news and information, according to Jim Lefever, author of the CommonCraft blog. In a recent post, he outlines how blogs can fulfill this need. Among his points: “With the community manager(s) having complete control of the weblog, they can use it to develop a stronger voice in the…

I routinely talk to employees at client companies who receive anywhere from 100 to 500 e-mails per day. Do they read them all? Don’t be absurd. They scan the subject lines for the ones they’ve been waiting for, then delete the rest. Among those deleted—or, at the very least, not acted upon are some that are asking for a decision or information…

No business leader wants to hear that it’s losing money because worker productivity is dropping. When they read a statement from a respected organization that suggests one specific Internet activity could be costing US businesses $36.7 million a day, they tend to sit up and take notice.

That’s the figure released by executive recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The culprit: fantasy…

Here’s one from the “blinding flash of the obvious” department. Wired News reports that pop-up ads and other annoying, intrusive, interruptive advertising—including spam—works. Well, yeah. I sorta figured that’s why they were still around. If advertisers weren’t making money off these aggravations, they would have vanished a long time ago.

The article notes that pop-ups generate 5 to 10 times the response rate of banner ads. Further, last year…

More than 21% of Americans—about 11 million people—use Instant Messaging at work, according to research conducted by those hard-working folks at the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The increased use of IM in the workplace (and in general) is partly a reaction to spam, which has rendered e-mail less desirable than it once was.

But with workplace IM comes the inevitable…

The Amazon.com Web site includes a section called “Early Adopters.” Here, that small group of people who have to have the first release of gadgets, music, movies, or whatever can find out what the newest items are and satisfy that jones. Amazon offers early-adopter categories for electronics, hand-helds, DVDs, cell phones, books, tools and hardware, video games, cameras, and more.

Each of those…