Holtz Communications + Technology

Companies accrue far greater advantages from providing their employees with social media training and letting them engage with their communities than they do from blocking access. I’ve written here before about the results of The Altimeter Group’s study that found the organizations that avoided crises or kept their impact to a minimum were the few deemed “advanced,” the ones that conducted such training and…

Katie Paine was the guest author for the second installment of the FIR Book Club, hosted by FIR Book Review Editor Bob LeDrew.

Katie Delahaye Paine is the founder of KDPaine & Partners LLC a New Hampshire- based research consultancy that provides measurement and accountability for corporations, non-profits and government agencies world wide. She is the author of the recently released Measure…

Some communicators I speak to at conferences and workshops are still surprised when I tell them that getting someone to like their company’s Facebook page is essentially meaningless.

Getting the like, they assume, is how they get their status updates into their audiences’ news feeds. But if those who have liked the page don’t engage and interact there, they may as well never have liked…

This morning I learned that Vocus, the public relations services company, has acquired email marketer iContact.

That Vocus would add email marketing to its portfolio is interesting enough, but for now, let’s focus on how I found out about the acquisition.

Not too long ago, I would have read about it in the business section of my daily newspaper, in my weekly edition of

The proliferation of Pinterest-like sites tells me that Pinterest has tapped into something basic, a desire to share images more easily and with more focused purpose than the traditional photo-sharing sites. Since Pinterest has become the social service du jour, a number of other sites that duplicate the fundamental idea—collections of large easy-to-share images—have sprung up.

I’m regularly directed to Gentlemint, described as “Pinterest…

European conferences that focus on the role of social media in public relations aren’t terribly common and those that are scheduled tend to be pricey. The Social Media World Forum is coming up next month in London, but its focus is broader than public relations and a ticket for the entire event will set you back US $920. There’s a marketing-focused…