Choosing an Internet, Digital Interactive Marketing Services Partner - Interviews and RFP/RFIs

How to evaluate your digital, interactive marketing partner, for local and regional businesses - particularly in the Washington DC and Northern Virginia marketing and advertising area.

We'll put it out there – as you evaluate prospective partners like KME Internet Marketing to help with web marketing initiatives, gaining exposure for your business and driving new sales from the Internet, this is exactly what you should seek.

Research and ask about ALL of these skills and expertise domains, either directly, or as part of your Solicitation or Request for Proposal/Information (RFP/RFI):

1.    Is the firm accessible, with local, hands-on, in-person availability of subject matter experts?  Professional, personal service and communications are critical.

2.    Who exactly will you be working with; are these professionals accessible?  The firm's website should include leadership profiles and pictures, and these individuals should be well-known in the industry and accessible via professional social media (i.e. LinkedIn). The firm's leadership should have demonstrated at least 10 years in the Internet Technology industry.

3.    Is the firm established, well-known and engaged in the community, with clear evidence of success over time?  Avoid the newbies, the out-of-towners, the affiliate marketing scams (there are MANY around), the off-shore-ers, the "website marketing mills", the inexperienced recent graduates, the recent career-changers, the part-timers and interns.  Seek those with community roots and involvement, knowledge of local geopolitics. Does the firm appear among the top results itself, in local search engine results? (Try this – search for "Loudoun Internet Marketing" in Google – and note KME is referenced in nearly every result on the first page!). Is the firm engaged in local business and social media forums?

4.    Does the firm require a long-term contract? This is a clear sign of a revenue-focused firm, vs. a customer services-focused firm.

5.    Is the firm "in it for the long haul"? Firms with established certifications and designations, for example "Disadvantage Business Enterprise" (DBE) designations by the State of VA and the SBA, provide evidence of invested commitment to industry and clients.  KME is a designated "SWaM" (VA DBE) and "WOSB" (SBA) enterprise (in process). KME also maintains Google Adwords certifications.


Read more at KME Interactive Marketing's Blog ....

Online Digital Reputation Management is a Requirement for Marketing Strategy & PR in DC

Nearly every business conducting business in the DC or Northern Virginia area (and elsewhere) is finding that more and more effort is required to manage their  online reviews and feedback. Particularly for local or regional businesses, the very first thing online consumers do in considering to visit or buy, is to seek out online reviews, search for online reputation or trust signals, and canvass their social media networks for trusted advice and opinion.

More often than not, the aggregate perception developed in a consumer's mind, from this online collection of "reputation proof points", will overcome ANY direct marketing, advertising or SEO efforts being made.

It's hard to fight back, and lawsuits really aren't the answer. This recent example here in Northern Virginia and DC may result in some compensation - but the damage is done, and will last for a long time on the Internet.

Establishing consistent, durable and very positive online messaging isn't easy, and requires constant attention.  There's also no specific, simple answer, tool or web service - and furthermore, any tools or methods that are working today, will not be as effective tomorrow, given the constant changes and updates being made to social sites, search engines and competitive reactions.

What is absolutely necessary, to maintain a very positive, trustworthy, engaging and respectable professional presence online - is professional care and feeding of your online reputation paired with superior products, services and customer engagement.  It's not necessarily expensive, but requires time spent determining your status, planning your approach, executing an ongoing strategy and staying on top of the reviews.

Your response to online review and PR challenges also requires absolutely professional, high-quality American English copywriting and communications skills (i.e. you can't outsource it overseas, and you shouldn't attempt if you aren't already a great writer), with innate knowledge and understanding of your locality and local news, your market and customers, and your products, services and technical vocabulary.

KME Internet Marketing can help - as they do for all of their clients. The customer, community and revenue fallout from bad Ripoff Report (a particularly nasty service), Google, Yelp reviews can be diluted, overcome, even officially retracted if unfair. Critics and negativity can be promptly, effectively, legally addressed. Positive feedback and testimonials can be solicited, collected and expertly highlighted. Great experiences and news can be prominently placed and optimized for maximum visibility. Professional public relations (PR) and communications strategies can be implemented, at extremely reasonable rates - and far more proactively and effectively than traditional advertising, web design, media publishers or PR firms can offer.

This is a difficult, quickly-growing issue that will always take time to address and monitor, and has to be an extremely important part of every business marketing and outreach plan.  Contact KME Internet Marketing today for more information, or to discuss the many ways they can help.

Selling Federal Enterprise Architecture (EA)

Selling Federal Enterprise Architecture

A taxonomy of subject areas, from which to develop a prioritized marketing and communications plan to evangelize EA activities within and among US Federal Government organizations and constituents.

Any and all feedback is appreciated, particularly in developing and extending this discussion as a tool for use – more information and details are also available.

"Selling" the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in the Federal Government (particularly in non-DoD agencies) is difficult, notwithstanding the general availability and use of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) for some time now, and the relatively mature use of the reference models in the OMB Capital Planning and Investment (CPIC) cycles. EA in the Federal Government also tends to be a very esoteric and hard to decipher conversation – early apologies to those who agree to continue reading this somewhat lengthy article.

Alignment to the FEAF and OMB compliance mandates is long underway across the Federal Departments and Agencies (and visible via tools like PortfolioStat and ITDashboard.gov – but there is still a gap between the top-down compliance directives and enablement programs, and the bottom-up awareness and effective use of EA for either IT investment management or actual mission effectiveness. "EA isn't getting deep enough penetration into programs, components, sub-agencies, etc.", verified a panelist at the most recent EA Government Conference in DC.

Newer guidance from OMB may be especially difficult to handle, where bottom-up input can't be accurately aligned, analyzed and reported via standardized EA discipline at the Agency level – for example in addressing the new (for FY13) Exhibit 53D "Agency IT Reductions and Reinvestments" and the information required for "Cloud Computing Alternatives Evaluation" (supporting the new Exhibit 53C, "Agency Cloud Computing Portfolio").

Therefore, EA must be "sold" directly to the communities that matter, from a coordinated, proactive messaging perspective that takes BOTH the Program-level value drivers AND the broader Agency mission and IT maturity context into consideration.

Selling EA means persuading others to take additional time and possibly assign additional resources, for a mix of direct and indirect benefits – many of which aren't likely to be realized in the short-term. This means there's probably little current, allocated budget to work with; ergo the challenge of trying to sell an "unfunded mandate".

Also, the concept of "Enterprise" in large Departments like Homeland Security tends to cross all kinds of organizational boundaries – as Richard Spires recently indicated by commenting that "...organizational boundaries still trump functional similarities. Most people understand what we're trying to do internally, and at a high level they get it. The problem, of course, is when you get down to them and their system and the fact that you're going to be touching them...there's always that fear factor," Spires said.

It is quite clear to the Federal IT Investment community that for EA to meet its objective, understandable, relevant value must be measured and reported using a repeatable method – as described by GAO's recent report "Enterprise Architecture Value Needs To Be Measured and Reported".

What's not clear is the method or guidance to sell this value. In fact, the current GAO "Framework for Assessing and Improving Enterprise Architecture Management (Version 2.0)", a.k.a. the "EAMMF", does not include words like "sell", "persuade", "market", etc., except in reference ("within Core Element 19: Organization business owner and CXO representatives are actively engaged in architecture development") to a brief section in the CIO Council's 2001 "Practical Guide to Federal Enterprise Architecture", entitled "3.3.1. Develop an EA Marketing Strategy and Communications Plan." Furthermore, Core Element 19 of the EAMMF is advised to be applied in "Stage 3: Developing Initial EA Versions". This kind of EA sales campaign truly should start much earlier in the maturity progress, i.e. in Stages 0 or 1.

So, what are the understandable, relevant benefits (or value) to sell, that can find an agreeable, participatory audience, and can pave the way towards success of a longer-term, funded set of EA mechanisms that can be methodically measured and reported? Pragmatic benefits from a useful EA that can help overcome the fear of change? And how should they be sold?

Following is a brief taxonomy (it's a taxonomy, to help organize SME support) of benefit-related subjects that might make the most sense, in creating the messages and organizing an initial "engagement plan" for evangelizing EA "from within". An EA "Sales Taxonomy" of sorts. We're not boiling the ocean here; the subjects that are included are ones that currently appear to be urgently relevant to the current Federal IT Investment landscape.

(Continue reading at the Oracle Federal Enterprise Architecture Blog)

Create a Social Community of Trust Along With Your Digital Services Governance Framework

The Digital Services Governance Recommendations were recently released, supporting the US Federal Government's Digital Government Strategy Milestone Action #4.2 to establish agency-wide governance structures for developing and delivering digital services.


Figure 1 - From: "Digital Services Governance Recommendations"

While extremely important from a policy and procedure perspective within an Agency's information management and communications enterprise, these recommendations only very lightly reference perhaps the most important success enabler - the "Trusted Community" required for ultimate usefulness of the services delivered. By "ultimate usefulness", I mean the collection of public, transparent properties around government information and digital services that include social trust and validation, social reach, expert respect, and comparative, standard measures of relative value. In other words, do the digital services meet expectations of the public, social media ecosystem (people AND machines)?

A rigid governance framework, controlling by rules, policies and roles the creation and dissemination of digital services may meet the expectations of direct end-users and most stakeholders - including the agency information stewards and security officers. All others who may share comments about the services, write about them, swap or review extracts, repackage, visualize or otherwise repurpose the output for use in entirely unanticipated, social ways - these "stakeholders" will not be governed, but may observe guidance generated by a "Trusted Community". As recognized members of the trusted community, these stakeholders may ultimately define the right scope and detail of governance that all other users might observe, promoting and refining the usefulness of the government product as the social ecosystem expects.

So, as part of an agency-centric governance framework, it's advised that a flexible governance model be created for stewarding a "Community of Trust" around the digital services. The first steps follow the approach outlined in the Recommendations:

Step 1: Gather a Core Team

In addition to the roles and responsibilities described, perhaps a set of characteristics and responsibilities can be developed for the "Trusted Community Steward/Advocate" - i.e. a person or team who (a) are entirely cognizant of and respected within the external social media communities, and (b) are trusted both within the agency and outside as practical, responsible, non-partisan communicators of useful information. The may seem like a standard Agency PR/Outreach team role - but often an agency or stakeholder subject matter expert with a public, active social persona works even better.

Step 2: Assess What You Have

In addition to existing, agency or stakeholder decision-making bodies and assets, it's important to take a PR/Marketing view of the social ecosystem. How visible are the services across the social channels utilized by current or desired constituents of your agency? What's the online reputation of your agency and perhaps the service(s)? Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a facet of external communications/publishing lifecycles? Who are the public champions, instigators, value-adders for the digital services, or perhaps just influential "communicators" (i.e. with no stake in the game)? You're essentially assessing your market and social presence, and identifying the actors (including your own agency employees) in the existing community of trust.

Step 3: Determine What You Want

The evolving Community of Trust will most readily absorb, support and provide feedback regarding "Core Principles" (Element B of the "six essential elements of a digital services governance structure") shared by your Agency, and obviously play a large, though probably very unstructured part in Element D "Stakeholder Input and Participation". Plan for this, and seek input from the social media community with respect to performance metrics - these should be geared around the outcome and growth of the trusted communities actions. How big and active is this community? What's the influential reach of this community with respect to particular messaging or campaigns generated by the Agency? What's the referral rate TO your digital services, FROM channels owned or operated by members of this community? (this requires governance with respect to content generation inclusive of "markers" or "tags").

At this point, while your Agency proceeds with steps 4 ("Build/Validate the Governance Structure") and 5 ("Share, Review, Upgrade"), the Community of Trust might as well just get going, and start adding value and usefulness to the existing conversations, existing data services - loosely though directionally-stewarded by your trusted advocate(s).

Why is this an "Enterprise Architecture" topic? Because it's increasingly apparent that a Public Service "Enterprise" is not wholly contained within Agency facilities, firewalls and job titles - it's also manifested in actual, perceived or representative forms outside the walls, on the social Internet. An Agency's EA model and resulting investments both facilitate and are impacted by the "Social Enterprise". At Oracle, we're very active both within our Enterprise and outside, helping foster social architectures that enable truly useful public services, digital or otherwise.

Sequestration Planning Benefits from Enterprise Architecture-Driven Value Engineering

The next 5 months portend a spectacle of US Congressional battles to be waged ahead of the pending, mandatory “sequester” - automatic, mandatory federal government spending reductions of about $1 Trillion over 9 years, in non-exempt, discretionary appropriations, set to take effect 1/2/2013. Forward-thinking planners in government IT organizations, in large Programs that depend upon IT, and among the Systems Integration (SI) community are likely to dust off Enterprise Architecture skills for analyzing budget cut implications across their IT investment portfolios, and possible cost savings opportunities to offset them. Leveraging a methodical, EA-guided approach to both assess impacts and adjust spending priorities, while illuminating new areas of savings, is a sure route to mitigating serious risks and delays to delivery of critical citizen services.

Whether you’re dusting off the existing EA artifacts, or need to take a very rapid, optimized route to constructing initial enterprise IT models, the driving principle at this time will be rapid, absolute reduction in complexity with a clear line-of-sight to cost savings. “Complexity” here simply refers to an inefficient or needlessly detailed volume of time and resources applied to deliver IT solutions – time spent re-engineering processes, building redundant interfaces and monitors, installing hardware & software in a piecemeal fashion.

Driving complexity, and therefore introducing cost savings, out of engineered systems is the central tenet of “Value Engineering” – “the optimization of a system’s outputs by crafting a mix of performance (function) and costs”. Essentially, deliver the same capabilities with better value by driving down the cost to build and/or operate. Section 52.248-1 of the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations) describes the “Value Engineering Clause” that is inserted into many large Federal IT contracts – enabling the contractor to propose changes to the system being developed (i.e. a “Value Engineering Change Proposal”, or VECP). If the proposal is accepted, the actual or collateral savings derived by the government (through cost modification to the contract) can be shared with the contractor. It’s a win-win opportunity for the government, system beneficiaries and the contractor community to discover and propose engineering changes that will lower costs, yet still deliver the same or better results.

Continue reading at the Oracle Enterprise Architecture for Government Blog....

Google Penguin, Twitter, and Keyword Research

Trendspotter Interactive Marketing Article - by Fulcrum Marketing Group

Google Penguin and SEO


Google regularly updates and tweaks its algorithms in order to reduce spam and remove weak pages from the first page of its organic search results. Google’s latest update, Penguin, targets Black Hat SEO artists that use aggressive SEO techniques and over-spamming and rewards those sites that focus on strong content and organic link-building. Penguin’s major focus is centered on backlinks and how websites use those links to increase their PageRank. To Penguin, the quality of the website that is linking to your domain is vastly more important than the sheer number of links that direct to it. Penguin will give preferential treatment to honest link-building practices that use mixed-anchor text and on-page optimization rather than back-handed tricks such as cloaking. Spending the time to build natural and organic backlinks in addition to writing quality content for your site will untimely be rewarded by Penguin.

Read more about Google's Penguin algorithm changes, Twitter and Keyword Research...

A Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture - Actionable Solutions

The recent "Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture" (US Executive Office of the President, May 2 2012) is extremely timely and well-organized guidance for the Federal IT investment and deployment community, as useful for Federal Departments and Agencies as it is for their stakeholders and integration partners. The guidance not only helps IT Program Planners and Managers, but also informs and prepares constituents who may be the beneficiaries or otherwise impacted by the investment. The FEA Common Approach extends from and builds on the rapidly-maturing Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) and its associated artifacts and standards, already included to a large degree in the annual Federal Portfolio and Investment Management processes – for example the OMB’s Exhibit 300 (i.e. Business Case justification for IT investments). Read more on an actionable common approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture...on the new Oracle Enteprise Architecture for Government Blog.