Holtz Communications + Technology

I had two interesting conversations at a family event last night in my home town in Southern California. (Truth be told, I had a lot of interesting conversations, but only two that warrant discussion here.)

First was my nephew, the oldest of my brother’s three boys. He’s going to school, doing some part-time work in the TV industry, and working more-or-less full-time for a…

Customer service via Twitter is the subject of considerable discussion both pro and con. A lot of the negative commentary suggests that people are taking to Twitter, in full public view, in order to circumvent the preferred method of customer contact: the telephone.

Among the various answers to this challenge is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention. Customer service on…

Copycats were expected in the wake of the Old Spice response campaign, in which the Old Spice Man responded to tweets with brief YouTube videos. After all, despite a few party poopers who didn’t like the campaign and a few misguided claims that the campaign didn’t produce results, ad agency Weiden & Kennedy has shown that the campaign, including the Twitter-YouTube effort, has…

Long before Twitter, business consultants advised to embrace customer complaints. Wise people like Don Peppers and Martha Rogers saw complaints for what they were: opportunities to identify problems companies can fix, leading to happier customers, better word of mouth and more sales.

In their 1993 book, “The One-to-One Future,” Peppers and Rogers write that “just by complaining, a customer is initiating a dialogue with a…

A debate several years ago, during blogging’s heyday, centered on the wisdom of introducing “character blogs.” These aren’t fake blogs. They’re very transparent in their use of a fictional character as the blogger. Some experts defended the practice while others insisted that it could never be a good idea. I fell somewhere in the middle, advising against them in nearly all instances but acknowledging…

UPDATE: It turns out that the original prank wasn’t a tweet, but rather a phone call to a friend of the singer, who believed the report and passed it along. But Twitter got the blame anyway. GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram posted a detailed account today.

When tweets began flooding Twitter with reports that Michael Jackson had died, I resisted what I’ll admit was a very strong…