Shel Holtz, ABC (Accredited Business Communicator), is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology, which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

What inspired you to write your latest book, Corporate Conversations?

There is a fair amount of literature available on employee communications for communication professionals. But there’s very little geared toward non-professionals who want to figure out the why’s and how’s of internal communication. I wanted to produce a guide that business managers and leaders could use.

In terms of content development, do you think the corporate intranet is still treated as the poor cousin to the Internet site in many organizations? Are communications staff doing enough to make their intranet a tool for internal communications?

In most organizations, yes, the intranet doesn’t get anywhere near the resources the external Web site gets. The external site is seen as a profit center while the intranet is viewed as just another repository of information for employees. That’s not true in all organizations, though. If you look at IBM, for example, former CEO Lou Gerstner identified the intranet as the future of how employees would conduct business. Since then, it has become THE most trusted source of information, more than supervisors and peers combined. It has been the source of innovation, it is being used to proactively identify information employees can use to do their jobs, and it is driving business initiatives. But, as would be the case anywhere, it took senior management support to make that happen.

Communication staffs are doing what they can with the resources they have. Where I think they could do more is in making the business case to management for investment more in the intranet.

Over the last few years, have you found that communications staff becoming better online writers? Or are Web staff becoming better communicators?

Neither, in most cases. Online writing continues to be terrible, and IT people still don’t understand communication models. Of course, they shouldn’t have to. Expecting IT to become communicators is like expecting printers to become magazine writers.

In your experience what are the “seven deadly sins” that content developers commit on the Web?

I have to limit it to seven? Well, okay. Here goes:

1. There’s nothing on the home page that tells a visitor what the company is or what it does.
2. There’s no contact information, or it’s hard to find. I’m constantly amazed at the number of Web sites that don’t include a mailing address, for example.
3. They publish long tracts of scrolling text with few or no subheads.
4. They write content that is meant to be read instead of scanned. For most reference documentation on the Web, people scan and will not put up with text that requires them to sit and read.
5. They use graphics as though the document is print. Clip art and irrelevant photos that don’t enhance understand or scannability just get in the way.
6. They write lousy headlines.
7. They write lousy links that don’t articulate specifically what readers will find when they click the link.

What are some of the newest challenges in online communications, e.g. wireless content, corporate blogging, etc?

RSS is one of the biggest challenges. This is the most important online technology since the introduction of the hyptertext transfer protocol and yet few communicators are even aware of it. Applying is represents one challenge, but another one that is less understood is the fact that people who use RSS feeds read their feeds in a news reader. The last thing they want to do is click back and forth to Web sites. RSS readers will disintermediate much of the Web, and content producers will need to figure out how to make sure they can get their messages across when readers are reading their content somewhere other than their Web sites.

Corporate blogging is certainly another challenge from a number of angles, from the need to develop employee policies to figuring out how to employ them strategically and effectively. More broadly, recognizing the growth of social software and the demands from audiences to be more engaged is going to represent a challenge to organizations accustomed to using their communication channels primarily for one-way, top-down communication.

Are you working any new book projects? If so, can you share anything with us about them?

I have a few proposals out, but nothing that’s been accepted yet. I am updating my manual for IABC, “Writing for the Wired World.” The proposals have to do with the new face of the engaged customer, business blogging, and business podcasting.