Holtz Communications + Technology

Warning: Long post follows!

On November 1, I conducted a webinar for Ragan Communications titled, “Best practices for building a better intranet.” There wasn’t enough time to answer all the questions submitted through the WebEx platform, so Ragan bundled them up and sent them to me. Here they are, along with my answers. I’m hopeful that readers will share their own thoughts on any of these…

For some time now, I’ve been advancing the idea that hiring a warm body to fill a vacancy is no longer a viable staffing strategy. Organizations need to hire people they feel they can trust, since trust is the foundation of employee engagement. When arguing against blocking employee access to social media, I point out that it sends the same message to…

Join me in the wayback machine. We’ll set the dial for 1980, the height of production of printed internal communications. There were magazines, newsletters, magapapers, newspapers. These communiques were produced by the corporation, business units, departments and teams. Memos flew through mailrooms and fax machines and photocopiers spewed a landfill’s worth of material.

Paper isn’t cheap—and it wasn’t cheap in 1980—but as the demand for paper-based…

In re-listening to an interview I conducted a few months ago with U.S. Department of Defense Senior Strategist Jack Holt, I waas struck by a sound bite that encapsulates brilliantly the reason organizations should stop blocking employee access to social channels and provide them with the training and guidelines they need to operate safely and productively in these spaces. Holt,…

I continue to be impressed with the way the US Department of Defense (DoDis handling staff use of social media. As most organizations continue to succumb to the FUD factor by blocking employee access, the DoD recognizes the importance of online engagement by staff at all levels—from Pentagon workers to soldiers in the field.

If ever an organization was security-conscious, it’s the DoD. Yet…

Among the reasons companies list for blocking employee access to social media is the fear that employees will disclose information they shouldn’t. This usually falls into two categories: compliance (such as posting private information about a customer) and leaks of a company’s intellectual property. This last type of disclosure often includes premature revelations of products that haven’t launched yet.

Most of these situations…