Two senior IBM executives are featured in an informative and engaging series of audiovisual presentations that present the case for blogs as strategic business tools. Presented by Harriet Pearson, IBM’s Chief Privacy Officer and Vice President for Corporate Affairs, and Willy Chiu, Vice President of IBM’s High Performance On Demand Solutions Group, some very interesting […]
Category: Workplace
Lessons from Interpublic’s global financial chaos
The Financial Times reports the sobering story of marketing and ad agency group Interpublic who, after over 400 acquisitions and global expansion, found itself having to restate its accounts for the past ten years and be the subject of an SEC investigation into its accounting practices: […] The company discovered “instances of deliberate falsification of […]
FIR Interview – Jonathan Mast and Aidan Hagood – October 24, 2005
In this edition of For Immediate Release podcast interviews, Shel enjoyed a 24-minute conversation with Jonathan Mast and Aidan Hagood. Jonathan is a senior communications specialist with Sedgwick Claims Management Services; Aidan is the communications department admin. Together, they host “QuickCast,” arguably the first completely internal podcast. Download the conversation here (MP3, 9MB), or sign […]
The easiest way to record and email voice messages
In the last couple of editions of FIR: The Hobson & Holtz Report podcast, we’ve been going on about Waxmail, a very cool new tool for creating and sending voice email messages. There are other apps out there but this is the easiest and simplest one to use that I’ve seen. I’ve been playing with […]
The characteristics of a great employer
A terrific feature in the Financial Times on what makes a company a consistently great employer uses US companies such as AG Edwards, Goldman Sachs, Nordstrom, SC Johnson, Whole Foods Market, Cisco Systems and Microsoft as their classic examples of such great employers. And what makes a great employer? With frequent reference to Built to […]
No more email guilt
BBC News: Live8 organiser Bob Geldof has revealed his contempt for e-mails, blaming them for tying up people’s time and stopping genuine action. Mr Geldof told a conference in London that e-mails “give a feeling of action, which is a mistake”. Here’s the best bit: […] He told delegates that what workers achieve each day […]
Murphy’s Law and smartphones
One of the downside elements of being away for a couple of days and not online at all is the time you then have to spend going through email and RSS feeds. It always seems to me that the high volume of stuff is directly proportional to the length of time you’re not online. Definitely […]
Killing Skypekiller FUD
As a long-time user of the Skype internet phone service, I read with more than passing interest about SkypeKiller, an application that’s designed to remove the Skype software from your computer. Not just uninstall it as you would on a Windows PC with the Add/remove programs applet. No, this eradicates Skype completely, either from a […]
The importance of continuity of personal presence
A good friend of mine in the UK has just left the big manufacturing company he’s been with for over 15 years and is now facing the Herculean task of quickly building and establishing his own identity. Two key starting points – a new email address (he had a personal Hotmail account but everyone knows […]
Extending RSS far beyond just delivery
Two extremely interesting and related pieces of information about RSS have come out in the past 24 hours. First, “How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued and consumed,” an 8-page PDF report from FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo. There is quite a bit of technically-focused information in Dick’s report, much of which goes […]
FIR Book Review: “Naked Conversations”
In this edition of For Immediate Release book reviews, Neville and Shel discuss "Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers," the new book on blogging and businesses by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, to be published in January 2006. The Book: "With a foreword by Tom Peters, author of such […]
Transforming corporate identities beyond the razzle dazzle
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas certainly was the place this week for many companies to announce a dazzling array of new tech products, alliances and ventures. The best place I found to keep up with what was going on was the excellent Engadget CES blog which had a non-stop stream of posts. Another […]
So what’s wrong with ghostwriting an executive blog?
I’ve been thinking about an item in a recent survey that says only 20 percent of senior business executives write their own blogs. The survey was conducted in October by PR veteran David Davis who published the results last week. Shel and I talked about it last Thursday in show #100 of our biweekly podcast. […]
Sound comfort for sailors
It’s comforting to know that HMS Daring, the first of the Royal Navy’s latest Type 45 destroyers launched on Wednesday, is fitted with the most advanced state-of-the-art weapons and defence systems. For instance: […] The main armament for the new destroyers will be the world-beating Principal Anti Air Missile System (PAAMS) – a collaboration between […]
Pricey freedom of the press
BBC News: Danish-Swedish dairy giant Arla Foods says the ongoing boycott of Danish products in the Middle East had so far cost it between £40m and £50m. As the Muslim world refuses to buy Danish goods in protest over cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, Arla is losing £1m a day. Arla has also had […]
30Boxes first look
I’ve been following the growing blogosphere buzz during the past week about 30 Boxes, a new online calendar application that some are saying is the killer calendar application. So I signed up for the beta yesterday. Noodled around with it for thirty minutes or so, added some appointments to my new calendar, set my preferences […]
The richness of blogs
One of the best articles about the value of blogs that I’ve read in a long time was posted by Robin Good yesterday. Information Overload: Blogs As Content Navigators, Information Filters, Trusted Niche Guides provides a good perspective on one of the curses of modern life, which isn’t how to find information – it’s how […]