Jeremy Pepper in Scottsdale, Arizona, has finally got a trackback capability on his blog, Musings from POP! Public Relations. I’ve been trying to persuade him to do this because a) he writes some very good content, and b) I can’t connect to that content if I post something on my blog related to his writing. […]
Category: Communication
IABC blog relaunched
Yesterday, the IABC Café opened for business, with incoming IABC chairman Warren Bickford behind the bar and in the kitchen. The new name for the relaunched blog – and the strapline "A gathering place for professional communicators" – offers a clear and encouraging glimpse into how this blog might develop. In his first post, Warren […]
Real organization transparency
Companies everywhere talk a lot about how important their employees are and the contribution they make to overall success. But most companies don’t do this with the public openness and transparency demonstrated by CMS Cameron McKenna, an international law firm headquartered in London. The Financial Times reports that CMS Cameron McKenna is believed to be […]
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #22: April 7, 2005
Content summary: Listeners’ comments (employee monitoring and performance; don’t write off podcasting; time-shifted podcasting, cars and home PCs; more on VNRs and responsibility, and audio search; smoking the podcasting dope down under); political scandal in Canada and media muzzling; update your crisis communications plans; Pew’s lost credibility; Macaw Nederland’s employee bloggers; IABC Café launches. Show […]
GM: Poster child for the executive blog
Since General Motors began the GM FastLane Blog in early January, it’s attracted considerable attention from business communicators. That attention has been sparked by who the bloggers are – senior corporate executives, starting with GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. The blog’s been under a continuous spotlight with a great deal of ongoing commentary and opinion […]
Prince of Wales “momentary lapse”
Just catching some of the TV coverage of today’s marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, I saw a brief BBC TV interview with the Prince’s communications secretary, Paddy Harverson. Amongst the tame chit-chat about today’s event (eg, was the Prince feeling nervous and how many letters of support there have been from the public) […]
Broadband in the UK leads the world
Daily Telegraph: [In the UK,] Southern Railway and T-Mobile will unveil details [this] week of the world’s first train wireless broadband service. The T-Mobile HotSpot service will allow up to 8,000 daily commuters on the London to Brighton route to access the internet. It will be launched in the summer. This item in a Daily […]
Microsoft’s Channel 9 and cultural rules
Channel 9, the social networking blog and wiki for Microsoft’s developer community and the outside world run by ‘5 guys from Redmond’, celebrated its first birthday last Wednesday. One of those 5 guys, Robert Scoble, deserves much credit in driving Channel 9 to its current prominent success level as a one-of-a-kind place that video showcases […]
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #23: April 11, 2005
Content summary: Listeners’ comments (podcasters’ and bloggers’ credibility on reporting information; what’s your favourite tool for conductng a communications audit and why?; on not liking listening to Catholic Insider; another perspective on the Gomery inquiry in Canada); blog aggregators, attribution and copyright; video news releases re-visited; organization turf wars on who owns branding; General Motors, […]
VoipBuster and free phone calls
My online friend Uri Levanon called me today from Israel. He called to my SkypeIn number. That’s in itself isn’t remarkable. What is, perhaps, is that he called that number – which is a normal landline number in London – from his internet phone service. Not Skype this time. Uri was calling from The VoipBuster. […]
Interview: James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore on Open Source Marketing – April 12, 2005
In this first of our new series of For Immediate Release podcast interviews, separate from our "Hobson & Holtz Report" bi-weekly podcasts, Shel and I enjoyed a 35-minute conversation with James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore about open source marketing. Download the conversation here (MP3, 14.6MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it […]
Blair and Prescott take to the web in election campaign
With election campaigning now in earnest as the UK general election on 5 May fast approaches, I’m not surprised to learn how the Labour Party is now using its website as an active element in campaign communication. Prime Minister Tony Blair has a dedicated area on the Labour Party website called Tony Blair’s Campaign Diary. […]
Podcasting: ‘Significant growth by 2010’
Now that Pew Internet’s data on how many people listen to podcasts has been roundly trashed as untrustworthy, would you trust any numbers from anyone else on projected growth in podcasting? Well, Forrester Research is widely regarded as a trusted source for IT industry analysis. In a press release yesterday, Forrester included this forecast on […]
Nike breaks new ground in communication transparency
Communicating on corporate responsibility doesn’t get more transparent than this. The Financial Times reports: Today Nike breaks a three-year silence on social reporting as it publishes its 2004 corporate responsibility report. This is Nike’s first report since a 2002 California supreme court ruling that the company could be sued by Mark Kasky, a labour rights […]
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #24: April 14, 2005
Content summary: Listeners’ comments (on open source marketing and the interview with James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore; podcast tags; on Rupert Murdoch and the internet; where will co-creation take us?; world’s first train wi-fi in UK – not; on video news releases and FCC clarification; blog post republication without attribution will grow; on GM, the […]
Blogging and messaging at 36,000 feet
Late last evening, my Skype desktop app dinged, and there was a chat message from Loic Le Meur. Nothing unusual there – except Loic was on a Scandinavian Airlines flight to the US at the time. He’s blogged his experiences from the flight. Not only that, he moblogged a couple of photos, uploaded a little […]
It’s not a blog but the BBC News editor’s site is a good read
I wrote a critical commentary earlier last month about the BBC News website and how its editor, Peter Clifton, had started writing commentaries that "look back at the week in the newsroom – and tackle some of your questions." My commentary focused on what I think the BBC could have done with this new idea […]
Blueprint ethics code for the profession
One thing I’ve frequently commented about in this blog is ethics in the communication profession. Or, rather, about the lack of an authoritative and cohesive voice that speaks on ethics on behalf of the profession. I’ve taken my own stand, so to speak, in castigating our professional associations – notably, IABC and PRSA – for […]
The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #25: April 18, 2005
Content summary: Listeners’ comments (on syndicating your RSS feeds and what a church is doing; Technorati search on your name can turn up unknown aggregated content; on keeping up the good work; more on professional journalists vs bloggers; thanks for the mention and the cool show; considering joining IABC and is MyComm any good?); intranets, […]
Just because you could doesn’t mean you should
Are character blogs – a topic that’s producing lots of discussion at the moment – worthwhile or not? It seems to me that a polarization of strongly-held views is emerging on something that isn’t really worth spending that much time on unless everyone is talking about the same thing. For instance, the link above is […]