Holtz Communications + Technology

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking.

Social media as a marketing mechanism is clearly hot. I can’t scan my feeds without finding yet another report of yet another study detailing companies’ increased commitment to and investment in social media. Here are just a few:

• eMarketer reports on an The Aberdeen Group study that found 63% of companies planned to increase their social media marketing budgets in 2009.…

A Nucleus Research study mangles numbers to prove that Facebook causes productivity losses while another shows employers are buying this nonsense.

Links:

• Nucleus Reserach study: Productivity and Security Red Flags with Facebook Use at Work
• Only One in Three Companies Address Social Media Concerns

And, lest we forget…

• University of Melbourne research proves workers are more productive when allowed to use Internet for leisure

Twitter’s 140-character limit makes it hard to have a thoughtful discussion. Brevity is great, but not for everything.

I was having one of these discussions with Rob Frankel—@brandingexpert—about whether Burger King got any value out of its “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign. This wasn’t a disagreement, just an interesting conversation. Conducting the exchange over Twitter lacked something, though. Hence, this post.

The conversation-starter was Dave Fleet‘s live tweet from something…

Since the whirlwind of activity that resulted in McNeil Laboratories pulling a Motrin ad campaign and issuing an apology, a chorus of naysaying has emerged that downplays the significance of the events. Some of these opinions make good points while others are just downright silly. Ultimately, though, what occurred between the brand and the mommy bloggers who launched the offensive…

Dell is out with a new blog they created just for me.

No, not really, but given the six months I spend on the road each year, adding Digital Nomads to my feeds was a no-brainer. There’s more to Digital Nomads than a blog, however; Dell is aiming to create a community of hardcore travelers who have embraced digital technology as an…

It’s gotten hard to pay attention to technology news without hearing a report from Websense or Challenger, Gray & Christmas or some consultancy tallying up the lost productivity companies suffer as employees spend time on Facebook and other non-work-related websites. The numbers sometimes reach into the billions of dollars. How do companies survive?

The answer of course, is that the studies are a load…