Holtz Communications + Technology

Badgeville, the gamification service, introduced “social mechanics” on June 20, with features including a “Behavior Graph” that allows companies to measure specific social behaviors, and “Social Context,” an activity stream not unlike a Facebook newsfeed that companies can add to their own web and mobile properties. In this interview, FIR co-host Shel Holtz talks with Adena DeMarco, Badgeville’s director of marketing, about social mechanics, the gamification…

Business, brand and product literacy represent fertile ground for internal communicators. Increasingly, employees know their own jobs and the products on which they work, but aren’t well-versed in other parts of the company or products they don’t work on. In an effort to improve product literacy—which arose mainly from employees’ own requests—Frito-Lay communicators Michael Karle and Joe Flowers developed a website that provides all the…

In the season finale of the Fox TV series Touch, savant Jake grabs a smartphone (which product placement clearly shows us is an AT&T Windows phone) and launches Air Graffiti, an AT&T service which, according to the website, “allows users to place videos, photos and songs “in the air” at a physical location.” He shoots an image that his father will recognize. After he vanishes,…

The New York Times dredged up a 2-1/2-year-old study to kick off a flurry of reporting about a new digital divide. The old digital divide had to do with access: Disadvantaged populations had less. Now that pretty much everyone can get online, the Times reports on a flurry of activity to ensure low-income families are digitally-literate so their children don’t get…

I review a lot of content during the week. Much of it comes from curated collections I follow, such as Smart Briefs. I get email updates from several sites, like AdAge and ZD Net. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of hundreds of blogs. I check the links that cross my Twitter stream, thanks to my Paper.li daily. I click…

Student loan debt in the U.S. has reached $1 trillion. Charitable organizations are suffering, but young cash-strapped students haven’t developed a giving habit. Organizations invest considerable sums in corporate social responsibility initiatives for which they get little recognition. Companies want to grow their levels of engagement with important young-adult audiences but struggle for relevance. Wouldn’t it be awesome if all of these…