Holtz Communications + Technology

FIR Live #12 Wednesday, March 18 10 a.m. PDT, 1 PM EDT, 5 PM Wokingham Listen in

For every company with a full complement of communicators on the payroll, there are dozens of communicators toiling to manage all of their companies’ communication efforts all by themselves. Marketing, advertising, sometimes even financial and shareholder communication, all done by one person. If he’s lucky, he has an admin, but…

Most organizations—and particularly those funded by taxpayers (whether an essential government agency or a bank that received bailout money)—are under increasing pressure to cut unnecessary expenses. With most people feeling the effects of the recession, ire rises when they see what appears to be profligate spending.

In an increasing number of cases, public relations—notably services provided by outside agencies—is viewed as one of those expenses that…

Every now and then, somebody prominently proclaims that public relations is not a profession. Usually this is based on a single narrow definition of the word that requires practitioners to obtain a license or some other form of legal authorization to engage in the work of a professional.

Even if you acknowledge this as the only definition that matters, PR is…

About 18 or 19 years ago, scorn was heaped upon me when I insisted that pretty much every company would need to adopt email and provide employees with email addresses. I got the same reaction 12 or 13 years ago when I proclaimed all companies would require a presence on the World Wide Web. Today, email and a website are…

The vast majority of the complaints about PR, marketing, and advertising boil down to a single communication failure: The message is not relevant to the recipient.

The late Ed Robertson, who ran employee communications at FedEx (reporting directly to CEO Fred Smith), developed a model for communication based on Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs. According to Maslow’s model, primitive requirements must be…

A few years back, James Carville told a group of communicators during a conference keynote that Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 presidential campaign rested largely on staying on message. The Democratic party strategist noted that candidate Clinton always returned the focus of conversations to the fact that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

In 2000, Democratic candidate Al Gore had no such focus, and few voters could…