Holtz Communications + Technology

One of the great benefits of the real-time web—instant feedback—is also one of its hazards. People react oh-so-quickly to anything that tweaks them the wrong way. Circumspection and patience are words that may vanish from the lexicon. On the other hand, we now know what hundreds of thousands of knees jerking simultaneously sounds like.

It happens when companies introduce new logos, start blogging…

I just ran a Google Blogsearch and found about 25,300 results on “kenneth cole” twitter Egypt. The world doesn’t need another post about the fashion designer who stumbled badly with a tweet that hijacked the #Cairo hashtag to promote his Spring collection.

And yet, an elephant lingers in the room.

The posts I’ve read (which, admittedly, doesn’t come close to 25,300) have fallen into a couple clear…

I just returned from spending a couple hours with IABC‘s staff talking about content curation as a new skill and responsibility of communications professionals. I tweeted that I was headed into San Francisco for the lunchtime meeting, prompting a reply from web consultant Ramsey Mosen asking my view of the ideal balance between curated and original content.

It’ll come as no surprise to regular…

On Wednesday, I was interviewed by Stacey Vanek-Smith, one of the correspondents for American Public Broadcasting’s “Marketplace.” The story covered the Downy fabric softener campaign to promote the product’s sleep-supporting qualities and, in particular, the social media dimensions of comedian Mike Birbiglio’s week of living in a New York Macy’s store window.

(My coverage of the Downy/Macy’s stunt is here; the comments are particularly…

Tech journalist and author Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman—PR counselor, podcaster and occasional FIR correspondent—have teamed up to write “Social Marketing to the Business Customer,” the only book we’re aware of dedicated entirely to social marketing in the business-to-business world.  Paul and Eric will join us on February 19 for our first FIR Live of 2011 to discuss B-to-B and social media.

For the first time,…

Earlier today, I gave an interview to American Public Broadcasting’s business show, Marketplace, about the role of social media in marketing campaigns. (The transcript and episode are here.) The story (which I believe is running tomorrow) was prompted by reports that fabric softener Downy was launching an interactive campaign featuring comedian Mike Birbiglio.

There’s nothing particularly new about the stunt that underlies the…