Holtz Communications + Technology

I was interviewing for a job about 15 years ago, a PR position with a high-tech startup. It only took the person interviewing me—he was the president or the CEO, if memory serves—to ask about my Rolodex.

For the uninitiated, I wasn’t being asked about the rotary card index loaded with removable cards where I kept contact information. (I still have a paper Rolodex…

Last Sunday, a Chicago Tribune article focused on Edelman in its look at reverse mentoring, in which older executives learn about the digital space from the younger workers who grew up within it. The article notes than 95% of Edelman’s US senior executives have “rotmens” (that’s “mentor” backwards) and that the program is being rolled out worldwide.

Let the spinning begin!

Gawker headlined its view of Edelman’s program,…

Late last month, TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington declared The Embargo is Dead. Earlier, Arrington had announced that TechCrunch would break embargoes with a few exceptions. That was followed, Arrington wrote, by the Wall Steet Journal implementing a no-embargo policy unless it ensured an exclusive.

Next came a couple highly visible violations of embargo agreements, including a Google embargo that PaidContent…

The FTC’s freshly-minuted disclosure rules for bloggers and the companies that reach out to them may be sounding alarms among those who aren’t already disclosure-minded, but a lot of bloggers and companies have always been mindful of candor and honesty. Long before the FTC even began looking at governing a practice that PR people, marketers, advertisers and bloggers weren’t policing for themselves, some…

I try not to be judgmental about things I haven’t read or seen. But when the train is barreling down the track at 70 miles per hour, another train missed its switch and is on the same track moving in the opposite direction, a busload of schoolchildren is trapped on the tracks in between and somebody has pried the track loose in…

If your reading was restricted to social media purists, you’d think that PR and marketing had no role left to play, that the rise of the trusted peer has so marginalized the communications profession that agencies everywhere should just fold up their tents and encourage their employees to learn a new trade.

The purists are right, but only if marketing and PR…