Holtz Communications + Technology

During the Q&A after my talk at the IABC International Conference in New York this past June, I got two questions that I get all the time:

• Where do you get your statistics?
• Where can I go to get up to speed quickly on all this?

I promised the group I’d put together a list of useful social media resources resources, which I’ve done. It’s not a…

There has been no shortage lately of commentary about where social media responsibility will reside in organizations. The broad categories of opinion shake out like this:

• Social media will wind up being PR’s (or Communications’ or Public Affairs’) responsibility.
• Social media will be the responsibility of those who champion it
• Social media responsibility will fall to project teams and others who have a need to use it
• Social…

ExxonMobil’s experience in the Twittersphere should serve as a wake-up call for organizations dragging their feet when it comes to paying attention to the social media space. It took only three days from the first time a tweet appeared from a Twitter account called ExxonMobilCorp to capture the attention of mainstream media and investment analysts.

This interest in ExxonMobil’s participation in the…

Participation in social media has been hit-and-miss among the last several IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) chairs. Even with an existing chair’s blog available to them, eliminating the chore of starting a new blog from scratch, IABC’s president, Julie Freeman, has been more likely to post items than the chairs.

(Not that 16,000-strong membershipship has been clamoring to read a chair’s blog, mind…

Google’s new encyclopedia venture, Knol, resolves some of the key issues afflicting Wikipedia. Anonymity is not allowed, for instance, so every article is attributable to an author based on his or her Google account. This means Knol can house several articles on the same topic. Anybody can suggest changes to a document, but it’s up to the author whether to incorporate those…

As organizations seek to expand their communication efforts to include social media, they often find themselves facing the same hurdles that were faced and ultimately overcome by earlier adopters. Efforts to introduce social media have been hamstrung by questions of time commitment, IT issues, and legal concerns.

Usually, blogs are the tactic that face these obstacles (although I have also heard…