Holtz Communications + Technology

Call it what you will: content marketing, content strategy, brand journalism, braided journalism or just thinking like a publisher. Whatever you call it, just don’t call it marketing.

I’ve been making this point—one I thought was fairly benign and obvious—to clients and at conferences and workshops where I speak. But when a participant in my workshop in Sydney last week tweeted the sentiment, it got a…

Wait and see. Bide your time. Practice patience.

These characterize the advice pretty much everybody is giving about using Google+ for business or marketing. It’s so new, they say, and, importantly, Google hasn’t even launched business pages yet.

In the meantime, I’ve been marketing my business pretty regularly on Google+. You should, too. There are two big reasons why:

At last count, 25 million people had…

A Business Insider post last week took QR codes to task, arguing they “can be confusing and can waste time. And as mobile technology progresses, they probably aren’t even necessary.”

The post, by former Forbes writer Dan Frommer, listed a variety of issues with QR codes to support the argument that communicators and marketers shouldn’t waste their time with them. Not a single one of those…

If you launch a campaign designed to push somebody to do something, the simpler and more tangible that action is, the greater the odds that they’ll comply.

I had thought this was something Greenpeace grasped based on the success of their campaigns targeting Nestle and Mattel. (I wrote about the Mattel campaign on Monday.) From Nestle, they wanted the company to stop…

After October 22 next year, if you want to buy a pack of smokes in the U.S., you’ll have to put up with some pretty distasteful images on the packing. You may, for example, see a smoke-ravaged lung, the corpse of someone who died from smoking, or an image like the one at left. These will be coupled with in-your-face copy…

A billboard is a poor channel for inspiring action. When you’re walking down the street and see a billboard, even if the message creates desire to buy the product it’s advertising, actually making the purchase has to wait until later when you may well have forgotten ever seeing the billboard in the first place.

What’s missing from a billboard—and a lot of other…