Holtz Communications + Technology

The surge in smartphone ownership seems to be supporting a parallel rise in the use of QR tags. Marketers, advertisers and communicators should start incorporating tags into their planning now. The cost is minimal and the benefits could be huge.

A week or so ago I was shopping for a TV stand, that piece of furniture that supports a flat-panel television…

Copycats were expected in the wake of the Old Spice response campaign, in which the Old Spice Man responded to tweets with brief YouTube videos. After all, despite a few party poopers who didn’t like the campaign and a few misguided claims that the campaign didn’t produce results, ad agency Weiden & Kennedy has shown that the campaign, including the Twitter-YouTube effort, has…

It should come as no surprise that, as a podcaster, I’m still bullish on podcasting. It’s not the subject of much conversation. You don’t read a lot of posts about it. But that doesn’t mean podcasting has failed as a medium. I remember a declaration that the World Wide Web was on its way out because companies were no longer talking about their websites…

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…

David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” and several other books, collaborated with Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan to write “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.” The iconic jam band—the most successful touring band in history—innovated a variety of business practices unheard of for recording artists, from incorporating and establishing a board of directors that included road crew and office staff to…

Uni-Ball’s launch of a Facebook-centered pen giveaway campaign during the Summer

Winter Olympics spurred a number of bloggers to question the wisdom of eschewing a company’s home page in favor of Facebook or other social sites. The Uni-Ball campaign was supported by advertising that directed consumers to the Facebook page with no reference to the company’s own website. The giveaway itself was conducted…