Holtz Communications + Technology

I was struck by two items that surfaced in my RSS feeds this morning.

(Yes, I still use RSS. RSS is nowhere near dead. I understand that armies of people are abandoning RSS for “better” tools but, like Dave Winer, I think people confuse Google Reader with RSS. And, like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I’m fine with the growing abandonment RSS. The more who dismiss it,…

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

Communicating mundane messages to employees is one of the tasks that has been made harder for internal communicators by the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities on internal networks.

Consider, for example, the communication of a benefits enrollment deadline. There’s little that gets communicated inside companies duller than employee benefits information. But employees still paid attention 20 years ago because the reminder was one…

A few years back, I launched a wiki which, I hoped, would attract internal communications professionals who would collaborate to create the ultimate resource for entry-level employee communicators. There are plenty of courses and books to help a new PR staffer hit the ground running, but woefully few places a new internal communicator can go to get a handle on…

CEO reputations are already in the tank. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, used car salesmen have more cred than CEOs and official corporae spokespersons. Those same CEOs should be looking beyond the current economic crisis. A rehabilitated image will be important once the sting of the recession has faded.

Writing on ReputationXchange.com, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross pointed out that a CEO’s internal…

I have never been very impressed with the employee communications services offered by most public relations agencies. I worked with a three-person team from one of the major global PR agencies once, and was astounded to find that none of the three had any internal communication experience at all. When I asked about it, I was told, “Employee communications is just PR…