Holtz Communications + Technology

On Monday, I posted a call for certification in the PR profession to establish a basis on which to establish trust between clients, the media and practitioners. If there’s any evidence that the client-media-PR world of a decade ago has changed irrevocably, it’s contained in a 45-minute conversation hosted on Google+ Hangouts on Air today by Duct Tape Marketing‘s John Jantsch. I was honored to…

(c) Can Stock PhotoThe idea of certification or licensing of public relations and communications professionals has been around for decades. Edward Bernays, often referred to as the father of modern public relations, spent much of his life pursuing licensing as a means of elevating PR to “the level of a profession.”

Government control of professional standards through licensing is a bad idea for…

Back in 2009, when reporting on financial services company AIG’s image woes, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow observed that AIG had retained PR agency Burson Marstellar to help with its problems. She then ran down a list of other unsavory organizations that had sought help from Burson, then concluded, “When Evil needs public relations, Evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed-dial.”

There’s a reason Burson gets these calls.…

Back in 2005, when IBM first encouraged its employees to blog publicly about their work, the company explained the initiative in part by noting that no marketing campaign could evangelize the company’s work better than its own employees.

In recent years, it has become more and more common for organizations to find ways to get employees into the social media space to…

I work in public relations.

In one form or another, I’ve worked in PR for the last 34 years. It’s a profession I love. It’s an outlet for creative expression. It lets me see projects through to completion and assess their effectiveness.

In my three-and-almost-a-half decades in PR, I’ve met thousands of dedicated professionals who also work in communications. I’ve been fortunate to work with many of them.

I…

One of the more distressing aspects of the recent Duke Nukem Forever dustup had nothing to do with Jim Redner‘s ill-advised tweet threatening to blacklist those who penned what he deemed particularly savage negative reviews.

Between Redner (who lost his biggest client as a result), New Media Strategies (which was fired from the Chrysler account over a similarly misguided tweet), former New York…