Monday, April 13, 2009
HC+T Update: April 2009
1) Mommy Bloggers Are Media Properties
2) Twitter: Gateway To Substantive Content
3) Next Webinar: Micromessaging for Communicators
4) What Are You Willing To Barter In Exchange For Content?
5) Online Americans Are Redefining What It Means To Be Entertained
6) Choose: Free Speech Or Medical Care?
7) A CEO Role Model For Transparency, Engagement, Responsibility
8) Site Of The month
9) HC+T Update
10) Boilerplate and subscription information
As usual, this issue represents mostly material I’ve written for my blog since the last issue (with the exception of the blatant advertisement in the first item). You can find the blog at http://blog.holtz.com. And don’t forget, you should seriously consider switching from the email subscription to the RSS feed. Just add the following URL to your RSS news reader: http://blog.holtz.com/index.php/update/rss_2.0/.
1. Mommy Bloggers Are Media Properties
I saw a news item reporting on the five winners of the first-ever Mommy Blogger Awards. This is significant on a number of levels, starting with the sponsor of the awards. This isn’t the Webbys or some awards program from new media publisher. It’s Scholastic. The folks who gave us Clifford the Big Red Dog, Harry Potter (in the U.S.), and Captain Underpants, not to mention school book fairs, is the company behind the Mommy Blogger Awards.
More specifically, it’s Scholastic’s Parent and Child Magazine that sponsored voting that wrapped up last Saturday. When an old-guard publishing business recognizes the importance of the blogosphere, it’s time to admit that social media—at least this part of it—has gone mainstream.
It’s a smart move on Scholastic’s part. Parent and Child Magazine targets exactly the same readers who read mommy blogs. Creating a relationship with both the bloggers and their readers is a good idea. Doing it in a non-competitive way—like, say, through a mommy blogger recognition program—is an even better idea.
The winning blogs also point to the mainstreaming of social media. One of the winners, “Salsa in China,” has a store and about 625,000 visits per week. Another, Momisodes, attracts 350,000 visits a week and takes in advertising dollars.
These don’t yet approach the numbers of Better Homes & Gardens (7.6 million) or Good Housekeeping (4.6 million). On the other hand, Salsa in China’s readership every week is roughly the same as the circulation of Men’s Fitness magazine (the print edition). These mommy blogs are not just blogs. They’re media properties. They attract readers, sell advertising, manage e-commerce sites. Their use of blogging platforms is incidental. Salsa in China and other comparable mommy blogs deserve the same respect and status as Barron’s (300,000 subscribers) and Wine Spectator (345,000 subscribers). It’s not silly or pointless for GM to make nice with mommy bloggers when they command readership numbers that rival the magazines in which companies have traditionally advertised.
Of course, that also means that pitching these media properties is every bit as legitimate an activity as it is pitching to Smart Money (820,000 subscribers) or Conde Nast Traveler (780,000 subscribers).
(This doesn’t excuse off-target, lame, clueless pitching. It does kinda irk me that all those bloggers who complain about being inundated with bad pitches seem to suffer under the belief that they are the exclusive recipients of such garbage. Talk to a reporter. They’ve been getting clueless pitches and lame press releases for decades. Hell, I got too much of it when I was a reporter, and that goes back to 1977; I remember stacks and stacks of mail containing unbelievably bad press releases.)
But once your website becomes a full-blown media property, it’s ridiculous to think you should be exempt from outreach by PR people trying to get their clients’ stories told.
2. Twitter: Gateway To Substantive Content
Twitter is all about brevity. One-hundred forty characters in which to condense your most profound thoughts. It’s perfect for the Attention Deficit Disorder crowd, since they can’t focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds anyway.
Everything you read about Twitter—and it’s a lot these days, between blog posts like this and a sudden infatuation by mainstream media—mentions the brevity thing. And I think it’s a load of crap.
Yes, the messages are short. But many tweets are just part of some greater content. Tweets direct you to blog posts, breaking news, videos, photos, just about anything you can find on the Net. Remarking on the brevity of these tweets is like pointing out the terseness of tables of contents. In a sense, a lot of tweets are like the listings in a table of contents, signposts to more information, more content.
On the most recent Media Hacks podcast, someone (it may have been Julien Smith, but I honestly don’t remember for sure) compared it to seeing a billboard for a McDonald’s hamburger. If it looks good, you don’t drive to the billboard and hope to be served a meal. The sign just makes you want to drive to the restaurant.
Other tweets are notifications of some kind, like Jeremy Pepper spreading word of a tweetup in Venice Beach.
Then there are those that are part of a conversation, which is greater than the sum of its tweets. Verbal conversation is mostly brief give-and-take punctuated by a few speeches and lectures. The fact that tweets are brief in a conversation is no big deal.
There are also queries that generate a flurry of interesting, if not useful, information, such as the one to which I recently responded asking our opinions of the greatest rock album ever recorded (I cast my vote for “Dark Side of the Moon”).
Far from a collection of short, standalone messages for the attention-challenged (as many see it) Twitter is frequently a gateway to more, deeper content; in these cases, its role is that of a portal. A social portal, that is, in which the destinations are offered by whomever you choose to follow.
If only there were a way to isolate the tweets of those who only update us on their activities. Then Twitter would be all about brevity. But I scrolled through over 100 tweets from those I’m following and couldn’t find a single simple status update to use as an example. If I had the time, I’d categorize those tweets. Maybe for another day.
3. Next Webinar: Micromessaging for Communicators
A new Webinar featuring Shel Holtz
Beginning Monday, April 20, 2009
$195 covers the entire five-week Webinar!
Register: http://tinyurl.com/d2k5ts
You can’t open a newspaper, sit in a restaurant, or attend a conference without being inundated with Twitter. The micromessaging tool inspires discussion ranging from “a waste of time for the attention-challenged” to “a key tool for organizations for everything from branding to crisis communication.
The simple fact is that Twitter is hugely important for communicators and will become even more important in the months ahead—both for external and internal communication. But it’s just as important to know that Twitter isn’t the only micromessaging option out there. And how these micromessaging tools are used can have an impact on your engagement in other dimensions of social media.
While there’s a ton of material on the web offering insights into Twitter and its kin, this Webinar offers the context of the organizational communicator, the issues and challenges of implementing the various uses of micromessaging in a corporate environment, the means of assessing the impact of your efforts, and how to use the tools strategically to support communication efforts and have an impact on the organization’s bottom line. It’s also not the same old gushing enthusiasm but rather a hard look at how Twitter can make your life easier in some respects and complicate it in others.
You’ll learn…
- How some companies have used Twitter as an internal communications channel
- The alternatives to Twitter for employee communications, and how to decide which to use
- The approaches to organizational engagement in the Twittersphere
- How brands should be represented
- Using Twitter to provide audiences with a gateway
- How to get the most out of Twitter search
- Using Twitter as a research tool
- Guidelines and rules for employee involvement
...and a lot more!
During the Webinar, you’ll benefit from lectures, links to other online resources, downloadable handouts, and interaction with your instructor as well as other Webinar participants. All this costs only $195-a fraction of what you’d spend on a similar session in a hotel meeting room-and you’ll never have to leave your desk.
Webinars are asynchronous-you participate when it’s convenient for you. A new text-based lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can take advantage of it whenever you have the time. Be sure to watch the video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for your professional development needs.
Shel Holtz, the instructor for this session, is one of the world’s recognized leading online communication authorities. He has led internal communications at two Fortune 500 companies and counseled scores of others, including Intel, Sears, Symantec, Aetna, The World Bank, The American Red Cross, The Walt Disney Company, General Mills and PepsiCo. He is a leading advocate for the value and power of communication from your organization’s leaders.
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn all you need to know to bring micromessaging into your organization’s communications mix with nothing but positive results.
Register: http://tinyurl.com/d2k5ts
4. What Are You Willing To Barter In Exchange For Content?
Back in 1984, Stewart Brand uttered the words that have become the slogan of the free content movement: “Information wants to be free.”
Those who advocate free content, however, are taking Brand’s statement out of context. At the first Hacker’s conference where he made the statement, he was talking about the tension between the value of content and the vanishing cost associated with distributing it. Here’s what he actually said:
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
While the free content movement has embraced the latter part of Brand’s quote, paid content advocates haven’t adopted “information wants to be expensive” as a motto. Maybe they should. At the same time, maybe they should argue that compensation for that content doesn’t have to assume a monetary form. In the world of barter, there are things besides money that have value.
KPMG, the professional services firm, has found—in the UK, at least—that Internet users are willing to tolerate a brief delay in getting to otherwise free content to watch an advertisement. In its third annual Consumers and Convergence study—produced by the company’s Communications and Media practice—KMPG found that more than 60% of British consumers said they were willing to receive the Internet ads as long as the reward of free content awaited them at the other end.
If people are willing to pay for “free” content with their attention, you have to wonder what else they might be willing to give up. Contact information? Participation in a brief survey?
Ultimately, it’s a question of convenience. The free content movement has a point when they argue that there’s so much free content available that nobody has to dig into their wallets to get at it. But there’s plenty of free music available, too; yet people seem more than happy to give Apple (or WalMart or Amazon) 99 cents rather than go through the hassle of finding and downloading illegal music via Bitorrent or Limewire. Convenience makes it worth the 99 cents.
The same concept can easily apply to other kinds of content. Sure, if I dig around long enough, I might find an alternative source for the information I need. But if getting to the easy-to-find, original, authoritative document only costs me my name and email address (for addition to a lead list), four answers to questions on a poll, or 20 seconds with an ad, I’ll be happy to enter into that bargain. It’s more convenient than starting a new Google search and assessing the quality of the resulting links.
In the survey, only 16% of respondents said they would rather pay for the content and avoid the ads. This suggests different views of what it means to pay. Money is the issue, not other kinds of exchanges. Of course, this is the UK we’re talking about. Worldwide, more than 40% said they’d rather pay than receive ads. That’s a lot more than 16%, but it’s still a minority.
Tudor Aw, KPMG’s convergence partner, said, “This willingness to view adverts in exchange for free content is good news for advertisers and is perhaps a pointer in the ongoing debate over whether advertising or subscription is the right revenue model.”
Ultimately, this could be one of those rare cases of having your cake and eating it, too. Content can be free and yet you may still be able to extract something of value in exchange for it.
5. Online Americans Are Redefining What It Means To Be Entertained
f you’re going to capture anybody’s attention, you need to do it where they’re spending their time. Increasingly, that’s social networking sites. According to a study from research company NetPop, time spent social networking has exploded 93% since 2006. That means around a third of the time U.S. Internet users spend online is devoted to communicating, not consuming.
Dig deeper into these social networking activities and you find out that people communicate online each week with, on average, 18 people one-to-one and with 110 people through group interaction. And this isn’t just kids, the usual justification for dismissing the importance of social media. Of active social networkers (those who have estalbished profiles on more than one site) 25.6% are between 18 and 24, 23% are 25 to 35, but nearly half are 35 to 64.
The study, “Online Activities among U.S. Broadband Users, 2006 and 2007 (U.S. $295),” reported that 76% of American broadband users are “joiners,” to use the parlance of Forrester’s technographic ladder. That translates into 105 million people in the U.S. communicating through social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, not to mention niche networks and social networks (like CarSpace and MyRagan) and social networks integrated into broadere sites (like FastCompany).
More time on social networks means less time spent elsewhere, and Netpop’s research suggests that reallocation of time comes at the expense of more traditional online entertainment. Passive consumption of entertainment online droped 29% over the last two years, to just 19% of the time people spend online. Another way to look at this: Peoples’ idea of what constitutes entertainment is shifting from passive consumption of online media to a more active engagement with other people, mostly people they already know. Sharing with others is more fun than kicking back and watching a video.
According to Netpop, the study suggests that companies need to do more to engage consumers and commit more of their online efforts to user-generated content and social media through which people can talk with the company and with each other. If companies don’t provide these opportunities, they will find it harder to track and engage consumers because, Netpop believes, they’ll find other channels through which they can participate in such conversations, even if it means building those communities themselves.
It’s easy to dismiss the notion that cmpanies must build community around their brands, but trying to caputre attention by hitting people with messages in places they’re not spending time is like shoving wads of money into a garbage disposal. I’m currently reading Martin Lindstrom’s excellent book, “Buyology,” in which he provides compelling evidence that people don’t pay attention to brand messages in video games, for example, yet companies are pouring exorbidant sums into in-game marketing. Business needs to understand that consumer habits across a loarge demographic swath are changing, and thus the means by which to reach them have to change as well.
The blog Bohan Style offers a good example with Victoria’s Secret Pink, a Facebook group into which more than 1.1 million people have opted. The post quotes Brad ABettese, executive VP and managing director of a Sanfrancisco marketing agency: “The community is a self-selecting loyalty program. Pink has been careful to provide tools that not only help to manage the brand’s identity, but communicate with loyal ‘friends’ and strengthen the brand’s relevance.”
The decision to deliver value through authentic engagement seems less and less optional in the face of ia growing body of evidence. I’ll be including Netpop’s numbers into my upcoming presentations.
6. Choose: Free Speech Or Medical Care?
Consider this scenario:
You’ve been dying to try out a hot restaurant that’s been generating a lot of buzz. So you make a reservation and, at the appointed time, you head to the eatery. You and your dining partner walk into the restaurant and approach the maitre d’. You give him your name, he finds you on the reservation list, and then hands you a document that looks oddly legalistic with a line at the bottom for your signature. Anxious to get to the appetizers and not interested in reading fine print, you inquire about the document. And the maitre d’ replies:
“Before we serve you, we’ll need your signature on this document agreeing that you won’t write any negative reviews of this restaurant for any online review sites.”
The idea is, of course, outrageous. And it’s all the more outrageous that Jeffrey Segal is hawking a template for just such a document to doctors.
Segal, a North Carolina-based neurosurgeon, is behind a concern called Medical Justice which is focused on shielding doctors from the deliterous effects of social media.
The template for the legal agreement is just part of Medical Justice’s offerings. Segal’s company also monitors review sites—including the growing number of sites dedicated to rating doctors—and using other techniques to prevent patients from posting negative comments to those sites. Some 2,000 doctors have become Medical Justice clients. In return for their fees, Segal’s company will find negative comments from any patients who signed the document and use the threat of legal action to force them to remove the comments.
What about patients who decline to sign on the dotted line? Segal advises the doctors decline to treat them.
John Swapceinski, who founded RateMDs.com, sees Medical Justice’s approach as forcing patients to choose between medical treatment and (in the U.S.) their First Amendment rights. He calls it “repulsive.” According to an AP article, Swapcienski was planning to post a “Wall of Shame,” listing the names of doctors who require patients to sign the waivers. (RateMD’s comments are anonymous anyway, rendering the documents impotent.)
Segal argues that doctors’ reputations are threatened by the uncontrollable reviews patients post to the web. Medical Justice’s web site suggests that “Published comments on Web pages, blogs and/or mass correspondence, however well intended, could severely damage physician’s practice.”
Yeah? So it’s okay that bad reviews of restaurants can destroy a restaurant’s reputation, but doctors should not be subjected to the same kind of critiques? The very notion that doctors should somehow be immunized against word of mouth is reprehensible. Doctors, after all, are paid service providers, just like plumbers (who are also subject to posted reviews on sites like Yelp, among others).
Segal practices the worst kind of spin by arguing that Medical Justice is not trying to restrict patients’ freedom of speech. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he huffs on the company website. His argument: Claims of malpractice can be made by bitter ex-employees and ex-spouses pretending to be patients. Of course, these are not the targets of the waivers that restrict negative posts by patients. Further, most negative doctor reviews I’ve seen have to do with bedside manner, attitude, and behavior. Those that address quality of care generally don’t assert malpractice—just that they didn’t like the results they got.
Even if Segal’s argument made sense, the bottom line seems to be, “Because the consequences to doctors are greater, muzzling your free speech rights is fine and dandy.”
Doctors—like restaurants and plumbers—have never been able to stop the word of mouth that occurs over backyard fences, at PTA meetings, family dinners, and church picnics. (In fact, positive word of mouth can drive business their way. Of course, the waivers don’t restrict patients from posting positive reviews.) Nor should they try, unless the word of mouth descends to the level of slander. The medical profession needs to understand that word of mouth has moved online and seeking to censor it is a very bad idea.
I once suggested to a healthcare client that, if they really wanted to embrace social media, they would offer discharged patients the ability to offer an online five-star rating of the doctors who provided their care. You could feel the foundations of the institution tremble at the mere thought. But it did occur to some communicators that, after the medical staff’s initial outrage faded, the doctors would probably wind up competing with one another for the best ratings. Doctors are, after all, a fairly competitive bunch.
Paul Levy, the poster CEO for transparency and author of the “Running a Hospital” blog, posts clinical outcomes to his blog. During an interview for my book, “Tactical Transparency,” Levy said the initial response from the staff was surprise and trepidation, but the staff ultimately saw the public disclosure of their performance as an impetus to continuously improve…which is eactly what they’ve been doing.
I’ve also noticed several negative doctor reviews that were balanced by opinions from others who thought the doctor was great. As most organizations engaged in social media know, unfair criticisms tend to be self-correcting as those with different experiences weigh in.
So what are the 2,000 doctors who have forked money over to Dr. Segal and his company—and the countless others who would do so if they knew about it—afraid of?
The truth, maybe?
As we who work in this space often insist, control of the message has been lost. Influencing what people think now involves honest engagement, not China-like barriers to the ability of your publics to view information you don’t like.
As for me, if any doctor ever waves a Medical Justice waiver in my face, I’ll find myself another doctor who isn’t afraid of honest opinions. I’m sure there are great doctors out there who will be happy to have my business.
7. A CEO Role Model For Transparency, Engagement, Responsibility
CEO reputations are already in the tank. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, used car salesmen have more cred than CEOs and official corporae spokespersons. Those same CEOs should be looking beyond the current economic crisis. A rehabilitated image will be important once the sting of the recession has faded.
Writing on ReputationXchange.com, Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross pointed out that a CEO’s internal communications stand to have a bigger impact on how a CEO is perceived by external audiences than external marketing or PR efforts. Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick, said, “as companies continue to announce layoffs, reputations will be built and destroyed on how well job losses are communicated and how fairly the process is handled.”
Gaines-Ross’ perspective is consistent with the findings of a 2006 study conducted by Fleishman Hillard and the National Consumers League. When asked what how they assess a company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR), most people said it hinged on how well the company treated its employees.
From what we’ve been hearing, the future does not bode well for a lot of CEOs who have taken a slash-and-burn approach to reducing the workforce.
Paul Levy, on the other hand, is one CEO who shouldn’t worry.
Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Massachusetts, has been using his Running a Hospital blog to keep internal and external constituents up to date on his efforts to control expenses while a combination of factors conspire against the hospital’s goal of meeting budget.
Paul reported on a series of quickly-assembled town hall meetings convened to explain the financial situation to employees. An even bigger goal of the meetings, though, was to solicit ideas from employees about how to address the budget gap. The meetings were convened following the distribution of a memo to employees. In a demonstration of what it means to be transparent these days, Paul posted the memo to his blog, a much more above-board approach to sharing internal matters with the public than deliberately leaking a supposedly internal-only document, the approach Citigroup took to get the word out that it had performed well during the first two months of 2009.
Overtly disclosing information will build much greater trust than pretending that an internal memo found its way outside of the company.
The memo included these candid and sobering remarks:
“For BIDMC, our hoped-for 2% FY09 operating margin (about $18 million) has disapeared. The state has reduced Medicaid payments by over $7 million, our major insurerer is paying us less than we had hoped, and reseach funding has also fallen short by several million dollars. In addition, patient volumes are substantially lower than budgeted as people in the community defer or forgo medical visits and treatments.
“Right now, at best, we can break even for the year if patient volumes return to budgeted levels. However, if they stay at current levels, we will face an operating loss of up to $20 million.
“Now, sadly, we have to crank up expense reduction…Part of the solution to this problem will be to lay off people. I’m not sure how many yet, and I am hoping you can help me figure out how to minimize the number by using more creative and less disruptive ways to solve the problem.”
Levy encouraged employees to write him with their ideas, use an electronic chat room he was setting up, or talk to him in person at the town hall meetings. He suggested elimination of pay raises, reduction of future earned time accruals, forfeiture of one or two days of past accruals, voluntary pay cuts, and unpaid leaves of absences.
Then he threw in the zinger:
“The senior managers of the hospital have recognized their personal responsibility to help with this problem. The senior vice presidents, vice presidents, and chief operating officer have been asked to take voluntary 5% pay reductions, and I have eliminated all of their bonuses for 2009, a total potential pay reduction of 15% to 25%. I am personally taking a 10% salary reduction and will forgo my bonus opportunity for this year, a total potential pay reduction of 30%.”
If it wasn’t already clear, Paul articulated the rationale for the measures imposed on senior staff and requested of the rank and file while face-to-face with employees at the town hall meetings: “to protect (BIDMC’s) lower wage earners (e.g., transporters, housekeepers, food service people) from measures we take, even if it means that the other people have to give up more of their salary and benefits.” After all, he explained, it would be harder for these people to find new jobs and the impact of being unemployed would be harsher for them. “A lot of these people work really hard, and I don’t want to put an additional burden on them,” Levy told his employees.
Here’s another surprise: Kevin Cullen, a Boston Globe reporter, was in the room. That’s right; rather than try to keep word of the meetings from leaking, Levy invited the press to attend. Here’s what Cullen wrote: “He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth when Sherman Auditorium erupted in applause. Thunderous, heartfelt, sustained applause. Paul Levy stood there and felt the sheer power of it all rush over him, like a wave. His eyes welled and his throat tightened so much that he didn’t think he could go on.”
On a follow-up post, Paul shared some of the emails he received from employees after the meetings, like one from a nurse who wrote, “I would be more than happy to forego a pay raise and reduce my earned time if that would mean another person in the hospital could keep their job. I think this is a great idea and I hope my colleagues feel the same.”
Levy plans to keep reporting on his thinking and inform employees of final decisions by April 1. Those decisions will also, no doubt, appear on his blog for the world to see. In fact, just today he provided an update to employees, posted (of course) to his blog. Among his messages:
“Your participation in this process and your advice to me has succeeded in accomplishing two very important things: First, we have reduced the number of necessary layoffs dramatically, from over 600 to about 150. This is a major victory and will mean a lot to more than 450 families who would otherwise lose their income from BIDMC. Second, we will do this at the same time we provide earnings protection to our 900 lowest wage workers. As you will see, this does come at a higher cost to the rest of us, but you have all made clear to me that this is consistent with our community’s values and expectations. Thank you in advance for your generosity of spirit. “
The entire post is well worth reading, especially for the detailed explanation of how those to be laid off will be selected.
My friend Albert Maruggi, who also blogged this story, sums it up well:
“Much of America has a very long way to go to eliminate the culture of ‘gotcha,’ of confrontation, a culture of ‘keep the info, keep the power.’ All these insecurities and tactics of greed will hinder the benefits of what social media can bring to an organization and our society. With each blog post, each honest answer to a criticism, each good idea raised and implemented, the organization becomes stronger.”
Somehow, I don’t see AIG’s CEO Ed Liddy meeting face-to-face with employees to seek their input on how to turn things around. Even if he did, I don’t see him sharing the experience on a blog or inviting the press to attend the meetings. Instead, I hear the protests, “We’re a financial institution, not a hospital.”
More’s the pity. Liddy’s reputation is most likely beyond redemption, but Levy will long be remembered as a beacon of responsibility, transparency, and engagement.
Hat tips to Ron Shewchuk and Albert Maruggi for some source material for this post.
8. Site of the Month
Real-Time Chatterbox
A lot of marketers probably looked at the Skittles experiment and said, “Damn. Having a link to Twitter chatter about us would be a great idea, but not if it means our brand will be sullied by all that crap.”
What would be great would be the ability to filter out the four-letter words, the sexist and racist comments, even entire tweets by trolls.
Enter Shannon Whitley. It took Shannon—the creator of PRXBuilder (Shannon chairs the technology task force for the Social Media Release Working Group), Chat Catcher, and a bunch of other cool stuff—less than a couple weeks to create Real Time Chatterbox, a utility that lets you apply a variety of filters to a Twitter search so you can include the stream on your website without having to worry about inappropriate content.
The service is free for individuals and non-profits; you can create two Chatterboxes per account. Shannon is working on a subscription pricing model for commercial accounts, but you can try it out now.
http://www.realtimechatterbox.com/chatter.aspx?id=4
9. HC+T update
>>Multiple speaking engagements on the horizon, including the annual conference of the Council for Communication Management and the New Communication Forum.
>>I’m off to Brazil in mid-May to conduct workshops for Petrobras and ABERJE, Brazil’s communications association.
>>I’m presenting the closing keynote at a social media conference Ragan Communications is hosting in June.
10. Boilerplate and subscription information
You received this newsletter either because you asked for it or somebody who likes you forwarded it to you.
Please feel free to forward it to someone =you= like!
HC+T Update is published monthly by Holtz Communication + Technology.
You can subscribe by visiting the HC+T site on the World Wide Web at http://www.holtz.com and selecting the FREE email NEWSLETTER page. You can subscribe ,unsubscribe and view back issues at http://darkstar.holtz.com/hct/mamboserver/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=list&l=hct.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this newsletter by adding “http://blog.holtz.com/update.xml” (without the quote marks) to your news feed reader.
Holtz Communication + Technology helps organizations apply online technology to strategic communication efforts.
(C) 2009, Holtz Communication + Technology. All rights reserved.