Shel Holtz, SCMP

Shel Holtz, SCMP (Certified Strategic Communication Management Professional), is currently director of Internal Communication at Webcor, a San Francisco-based commercial contractor. He is responsible for employee and executive communication, as well as social media. He also supports Webcor’s corporate public relations efforts.

Before joining Webcor in October 2017, Shel spent 21 years as principal of Holtz Communication + Technology, where he brought more than 40 years of organizational communications experience in both corporate and consulting environments to his long list of clients. He is experienced in employee communications, corporate public relations, crisis communications, media relations, financial communications, investor relations, marketing communications, and compensation and benefits communications. In addition to integrating technology into communications strategies, his expertise includes strategic communications planning, change management, organizational culture, business initiatives, and communications research.

Before forming Holtz Communication + Technology, Shel was senior communications consultant and the communications practice leader for Alexander & Alexander Consulting Group in San Francisco, California. (A&ACG has since been acquired by Aon Consulting.) Other positions include director of corporate communications for Allergan, Inc., a Fortune 400 pharmaceutical company, and at Mattel, Inc. He also has worked for William M. Mercer, Inc., ARCO and Transamerica Financial Corporation.

In addition to his consulting and development work, Shel is a regular speaker on topics surrounding the application of online technology to strategic organizational communication. He speaks regularly at IABC and Ragan Communication conferences. He also has been on programs for the International Quality and Productivity Center, The American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business, the American Gas Association, the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts, the Association of California Water Agencies, and the Western Pension & Benefits Conference, among others. He also spoke regularly on the Lexis-Nexis touring seminar, “Communicating in a Wired World.”

Shel is a five-time winner of IABC’s Gold Quill award (most recently winning in 1997 for external Web sites) and was named IABC/Los Angeles’s Communicator of the Year in 1988. Shel served six years on IABC’s executive board, two as director of U.S. District 6 and four as a director-at-large. While a director-at-large, he held the Technology portfolio, among others. During his term on the board, he served three times as a member of the executive committee. He has also served as chapter president for IABC/Los Angeles and in a variety of other volunteer positions in IABC at the chapter, district and international levels. Shel earned his IABC accreditation (ABC/Accredited Business Communicator) in 1984.

In 2005, Shel was named an IABC Fellow, the highest honor IABC confers on its members. He also is an Accredited Business Communicator through IABC.

Shel is a Senior Fellow with the Conference Board’s Marketing and Communications Center and a Platinum Fellow of The Mayo Clinic Social Media Network.

Shel has applied online technology to his communication efforts on behalf of companies and clients since the mid-1980s. His most recent book is “Tactical Transparency,” co-written with John C. Havens and published by Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. Shel is also the co-author of “How to Do Everything with Podcasting,” co-written with Neville Hobson and published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill and “Blogging for Business,” co-written with Ted Demopoulos and published by Kaplan. Earlier books include “Corporate Conversations,” a guide to employee communications, published by Amacom. “Public Relations on the Net,” published by AMACOM; and “The Intranet Advantage,” published by Ziff-Davis Press. He also wrote the manuals, “Communication and Technology” and “Communicator’s Guide to Intranets,” published by Ragan Communications and “Writing for the Wired World,” published by IABC.

Shel graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in Journalism from California State University, Northridge, in 1976.

FIR #21: Vying for relevance

February 8, 2016 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Today’s panel includes Richard Binhammer, one of the earliest adopters of social media for business while on the Dell communications team; Olivier Blanchard, director of Operations and Strategy at Frontspace Media; and Howard Greenstein, chief operating officer of DomainSkate and co-founder of the Social Media Club. Today’s topics include the 2016 crop of Super Bowl ads and whether the $5 million price tag might have been better spent on digital media, the need for CEOs to emerge from the shadows and take a more active role positioning their companies and good corporate citizens, the Bernie Sanders campaign’s use of SnapChat in New Hampshire (leading to a longer conversation on whether SnapChat is ready for prime time), and much more.
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FIR #20: Don’t call us lobbyists

February 1, 2016 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Today’s panel includes Shonali Burke, president and CEO of Shonali Burke Consulting; Chip Griffin, founder of CustomScoop and a communication consultant; and Doug Haslam, a senior consultant at Stone Temple Consulting. topics include an opinion from a New York state commission classifying PR practitioners as lobbyists, a new form of single-topic journalism, the rollout of Facebook Live to the Facebook iPhone app, steps to improve the chances of your video going viral, whether share of voice still matters as a metric, the turmoil at Twitter and whether it should guide communicators’ decisions about tweeting, and whether specialization is a good idea for agencies.
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Circle of Fellows #5: Certification, Accreditation, and Education

January 29, 2016 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Call them the “shuns:” communicators are routinely offered opportunities for certification, accreditation, and education (including everything from advanced degrees to continuing education credits). Which should you consider? What value can they add to your job and career? Four IABC Fellows explore the “shuns” and discuss IABC’s new certification program.
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FIR #19: Can’t brands just shut up for 24 hours?

January 25, 2016 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Today’s panel includes Christopher Barger, Senior VP of Global Programs at Voce Communications (a Porter Novelli company); Gerry Corbett, CEO and founder of Redphlag, a marketing, branding, and PR consultancy (and former president of the Public Relations Society of America), and David Spark, founder of brand journalism company Spark Media Solutions. We talked about the 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer, a Jay Baer post that offered three rules for brands tempted to offer their thoughts and prayers for deaths and tragedies, Facebook’s latest effort to make Facebook the only corner of the Internet you’ll ever need, diversity issues arising as a result of the Oscar boycott, the Flint water crisis, and more.
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FIR #18: PR earns a C- for channels and measurement

January 18, 2016 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Today’s panel includes Gini Dietrich, CEO of Arment Dietrich and co-host of the Inside PR podcast; Zoetica Media CEO and award-winning blogger Kami Huyse; and Laura Thomas, chief blogger at Dell. In today’s episode, we talked about PR’s failure to embrace the PESO (paid, earned, shared, owned) content channel model as well as a continued measurement focus on outputs and outtakes 9but not outcomes); the rise of content production houses to feed the social media beast in a timely manner; the possible downsides of Virtual Reality (as well as Cision’s distribution of VR goggles to PR agencies and Dell’s efforts to engage customers about its products’ VR capabilities); President Obama’s social media legacy; live Periscope streams now appearing directly in Twitter feeds (if you’re using an iOS device); and whether brands should be jumping on Peach — the latest shiny object — or focusing resources on email marketing.
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FIR #17: Who the f**k are you, EFF?

January 11, 2016 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Today’s panel includes Zeno Group’s head of US Digital and Customer Experience, Frank Eliason; top-ranked social business leader and influencer Scott Monty; and Giovanni Rodriguez, head of Kahuna Labs, a new innovation and services group at Kahuna, a marketing tech company. Topics include how PR staffs can handle a loose-cannon CEO, agencies rushing staff into Virtual Reality training, the possibility that Twitter will increase its character limit from 140 to 10,000 (and what that might mean for brands), and a lot more.
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FIR #16: Vapid, lazy, and ludicrous 2016 predictions

January 4, 2016 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Happy new year, and welcome to episode #16 of For Immediate Release. This week’s panel includes digital communications consultant Arik Hanson, principal consultant with ACH Communications in Minneapolis; Todd Van Hoosear, vice president of Public Relations and Stakeholder Engagement for Eric Mower + Associates in Boston; and Dan York, the Internet Society’s senior content strategist. In today’s episode, we covered new year prediction posts, the rise of Snapchat, Hubspot’s outbound marketing efforts hurting its inbound marketing reputation, the winner-take-all economy (and what communicators can do to help companies trying to compete), the PR practice of funding front groups, the notion of engaging many by targeting a few, the open web vs. the corporate web, the Boston Globe’s reporters delivering newspapers (and using social media to talk about it), and whether brands should follow news sites’ move to get rid of comment sections.
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Are the “shuns” worth it? Circle of Fellows to examine accreditation, certification, education for communicators

December 28, 2015 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

Communicators are routinely bombarded with opportunities to earn accreditation and certification from a variety of organizations, and to get additional (or continuing) education from universities, companies, associations, and consultants. Some communicators flock to these opportunities; others dismiss them.

Join a panel of IABC Fellows at noon EST on Thursday, January 28 for a freewheeling discussion on the value (or lack thereof) of the “shuns” — accreditation, certification, and education. The panel — moderated by FIR host Shel Holtz — will feature Barbara Puffer, Mark Schumann, Jennifer Wah, and Brad Whitworth.
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FIR #15: The open web vs. content silos

December 28, 2015 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Welcome to episode #15 of For Immediate Release. This week’s panel includes digital communications consultant Chris Abraham, Thornley-Fallis Communications CEO and Inside PR co-host Joseph Thornley, and marketing technology specialist and business strategist Lynette Young. This week’s episode covers new FTC guidance on native advertising, Edelman’s restructuring, whether the end to a ban on broadcasting Radio Free Europe and Voice of America in the U.S. has led to PR assignments, the downside of workplace collaboration, and whether share buttons cause more trouble than their worth. Dan York’s Tech Report covers the malware attack on Hyatt, the inclusion of adblocking software in a computer manufacturer’s default browser, and the war of words between Medium founder Ev Williams and blogging pioneer Dave Winer.
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FIR #14: Where does employee news belong?

December 21, 2015 by Shel Holtz Leave a Comment

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Welcome to episode #14 of For Immediate Release. This week’s panel includes internal communications consultants Steve Crescenzo (a very funny guy), Jim Ylisela (who also has impressive journalism credentials), and Ron Shewchuk (who is also a master griller). In today’s episode, we covered a new Twitter account from the TSA designed to help travelers in real time, Denver Water’s content marketing efforts designed to make the utility the go-to water resource on the web, why CEOs aren’t involved in their crisis plan development or training, podcasting to employees, the importance of face-to-face at-work encounters for Millennials, and whether internal news belongs on the home page of the intranet or injected into the activity stream (or both, or more). Dan York’s Tech Report covers the World Summit on the Information Society, the demise of Skitch (except on the Mac), and the launch of Wirecast Go.
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FIR #21: Vying for relevance

FIR #20: Don’t call us lobbyists

Circle of Fellows #5: Certification, Accreditation, and Education

FIR #19: Can’t brands just shut up for 24 hours?

FIR #18: PR earns a C- for channels and measurement

FIR #17: Who the f**k are you, EFF?

FIR #16: Vapid, lazy, and ludicrous 2016 predictions

Are the “shuns” worth it? Circle of Fellows to examine accreditation, certification, education for communicators

FIR #15: The open web vs. content silos

FIR #14: Where does employee news belong?

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