Holtz Communications + Technology

A few years ago, I was working with the communication staff of a city’s travel-and-tourism organization. One of the marketers on the staff had been assigned outreach to the Hispanic travel community, but hadn’t been able to find much through Google and other search tools.

I pointed her to Delicious and had her plug her search terms in. The treasure trove of content…

On last week’s edition of This Week in Tech, the panel unanimously belittled Google for its announcement of a Chrome web store. Questioning the point of the tool, frequent panelist John C. Dvorak summarized the rest of the group’s befuddlement by asking whether people couldn’t just go to the application’s website.

Of course they can, but as the number of apps proliferate, having them aggregated…

Whenever a company mishandles a social media kerfuffle, there is no shortage of bloggers and other experts ready to offer biting criticism and recommendations for how the organization should have handled the situation. Sometimes the advice is good, sometimes it’s not. The advice offered is rarely consistent from one expert to another. And it’s even more rarely forgiving of companies new to the…

Cross-posted from Stop Blocking

An article by Barclay Communications appearing in a tech publication from Northern Ireland is strident in its insistence that blocking employee access to Facebook is a requirement in the face of so much risk.

“According to a recent MyJobGroup study, over half of the UKs workforce could be trying to check and update their social networking sites in…

The various reasons companies block employee access to social media can be summed up in one word: fear. Among the many things that make employers afraid, from lost productivity to network infections, worry that employees will say the wrong things—or, worse, bad things—ranks near to the top.

A Forrester study released last week (and reported by Josh Bernoff) offers a good-news/bad-news outlook on the…

The outrage over intensified screening procedures at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport checkpoints was palpable. Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter were swamped with complaints, claims of constitutional violations, tales of excess (like the flight attendant forced to remove her prosthetic), and calls for protests.

The nonstop flood of protest led to attention from the mainstream press. TSA-related stories appeared regularly at…