Holtz Communications + Technology

The president of the Fortune 400 company where I worked called me into his office to proclaim that “We are now a learning company.” He had just returned from a conference where he sat in on a session about learning companies and he was pumped. So I asked, “What does that mean?”

His face wrinkled up in consternation. “It means we learn. We learn all the time,” he…

Listening to a podcast the other day, I heard an interview with a businessman who had grown his company using social media. He was the keynote speaker at a conference the podcaster was attendings; she was able to snag him for an the interview in which he offered takeaways from his experiences.

Among other recommendations, he observed that social media…

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

Conventional wisdom says the days of long-form content are over. Between the character limit on tweets, the brevity of most Facebook status updates, the quick-scroll through Instagram photos, the disdain for YouTube videos that exceed four or five minutes…

As organizational communicators are occupied increasingly with helping their organizations become media companies—producing streams of different types of content that satisfy audience interests, support business and brand goals, and encourage sharing and conversation—it can be instructive to look at what actual media companies are doing to engage audiences.

Mainstream media organizations have struggled mightily in the digital era, but there are those that are…

When newspapers first started publishing to the web, the content was free. Back then, the web was a secondary source, a supplement to newspaper that landed on your doorstep (or in your gutter) every day. As digital content grew more popular and newspaper subscriptions rates started their descent, publishers struggled to find ways to replace the income from paid subscriptions…

The Pitch, AMC’s reality series that pits two advertising agencies in a pitch for business, isn’t what you’d call a ratings success. In its last outing, the show drew about 340,000 viewers. (Compare that to The History Channel’s Ax Men, which attracted 10 times that number.)

It’s tough to sell advertising for a series few people are watching, but Muse Communications—one of the agencies competing on the…