Holtz Communications + Technology

The weekly review of content that caught my eye for one reason or another.

I’ve heard of diversification, but this one is a real eyebrow-raiser. Venture Beat reports that Ford Motor Company (officially known as “that place where Scott Monty works”) might be moving into the password storage business. Ad agency Ogilvy Paris developed a promotional video that spotlights…

Badgeville, the gamification service, introduced “social mechanics” on June 20, with features including a “Behavior Graph” that allows companies to measure specific social behaviors, and “Social Context,” an activity stream not unlike a Facebook newsfeed that companies can add to their own web and mobile properties. In this interview, FIR co-host Shel Holtz talks with Adena DeMarco, Badgeville’s director of marketing, about social mechanics, the gamification…

This is the fourth installment in a series on developing and delivering social media training for employees.

So far in this series, I’ve covered the need for a social media training program in your organization and why it should be based on a foundation of solid research. Based on the results of your research, you’ll need to determine what to include in your…

Business, brand and product literacy represent fertile ground for internal communicators. Increasingly, employees know their own jobs and the products on which they work, but aren’t well-versed in other parts of the company or products they don’t work on. In an effort to improve product literacy—which arose mainly from employees’ own requests—Frito-Lay communicators Michael Karle and Joe Flowers developed a website that provides all the…

A review of some of the more interesting stories that have crossed my feeds in the last seven days.

If you’re The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC or another brand on the list of Twitter’s partner companies, your followers will soon be able to see something followers of no other account can see: more than 140 chararacters. These “expanded postings” will show video,…

A weekly review of some of the more interesting stories that have crossed my feeds in the last seven days.

While the deals have grown more sophisticated, with American Express and some hotel chains applying check-in rewards tied to your account number, growth of Foursquare has slowed. A recent study from Edison Research reveals that 74% of Americans…