Interactive Information Management

Beachfront, or Socialfront Property for Rent - No Bedbugs!

2012-01-16T07:06:00.000-08:00

(From the Kings of Metaphor at KME...why should all the physical land, property owners and developers have all the fun?)

That's right, we've got some amazing un-real estate now for rent, in all the great places.

Whether you're looking for a quick getaway, or longer-term (monthly contracts available) socialfront property – we've got attractive options for you. Seeking a short term stay among the technorati in sunny San Diego? Need a monthly rental with all the amenities in the company of other New Jersey shore online enthusiasts? Looking to rub shoulders online with fun-loving, healthy lifestyles and the social media elite of Denver? Looking to be a virtual roommate with other Twitter fans in DC, but don't want the hassle or risk of ownership or long-term commitments?

Several highly desirable, attractive, extremely conversational socialfront properties or "channels" are available today, for temporary, short or long-term lease. Your lease agreement can range from full-time residence to metered instances of occupation. Let others know you're visiting, or rest comfortably in virtual anonymity. "Occupy our social media" with easy terms, minimal damage deposit and few restrictions on redecoration – "furniture" and post-visit cleanup included!

If you're really cool – we'll throw in some free nights.

Rent a piece of the socialfront action today – in these easy steps:

1 – Choose your audience, your ideal social community – top-visited, fun locations currently include DC, San Diego, Denver, Northern Virginia and New Jersey! (We’re also the largest un-land owner of the most desirable virtual locations in picturesque @Loudoun County, VA – http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifDC's Wine & Beer Country!)

2 – Tell us your rental plans – how often will you visit, over what time period?

3 - What would you say to your neighbors, your new community? Are you going to be loud and obnoxious, or just chillax?

4 – Do you mind roommates, or want the property all for yourself?

5 – Perhaps you'd like help – letting others know about your parties, your presence, your pad? Your pumped-up kicks?

(read more)...

B2B vs. B2C SEO - Differences Between Strategic Approaches and Skills

2011-12-22T07:44:00.000-08:00

What are the differences between SEO actions taken for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) campaigns, vs. Business-to-Business (B2B)?

KME Internet Marketing has delivered many B2B campaigns over the past years, typically regarding very technically-complex or domain-specific subject matter - we've found the following information and strategies tend to ring true for most...

For B2B SEO vs B2C, the roles and intentions of searchers are much more diverse, the engagement channels are more complex, and the visits will occur over a longer period of time representing not only diverse “solution” needs, but reflecting diverse problems and situations.

Therefore, B2B SEO requires a much more complex Keyword, Web Content Management and Analytics Strategy, in close coordination with the CRM and Business Demand Management actions.

Keyword strategy for B2C is predominantly about the product features, support, reviews – B2B SEO strategy is more complex and needs to include:

a. Coverage and durability of the company, relevance of brand
b. Breadth and categories of offerings
c. Ability to service and support the offering
d. Depth of competence in offering plus related offerings
e. Understanding of the needs, issues, problems that the offering addresses
Verifiable depth of competence and engagement in the community for the offering domain (searchers are "vetting" the company, its expertise, its reliability and presence)
f. Case studies, client examples
g. Offering value = return on investment, partnership, transaction efficiencies, profitable cost structures, dedicated support and training…not just price and immediately usable features
Keyword strategy will require understanding of industry, and include many industry-specific terms, names, references - KME is particularly adept at absorbing, learning and establishing rapid expertise in your domain content.
Optimize landing pages (and event landing "mini-sites") to encourage "stickiness", i.e. exploration of additional relevant and value-added material on a site – objective isn’t necessarily to close a sale, but to encourage a contact, open dialogue or continued education. This will very likely require some redesign or modification of the "Information Architecture", i.e. how web content is organized, accessed and presented to user segments.
Keyword strategy is supported by supplementing landing pages with existing corporate content – i.e. harvest and re-purpose internal corporate content for online marketing, engagement; this includes documents, videos, presentations and internal dialogue or forum content
Creating long-term CRM funnels and actively monitoring engagement strategy results is extremely important – including building profiles of the multiple buyer roles that may be searching, interacting (i.e. Executives, Buying Agents, SMEs, Alliance Managers, etc.). Keyword strategy must support multiple roles.
Keyword strategy and backlink creation needs to consider very important "vertical" search engines (i.e. not just Google), i.e. topic-specific sites, subject-specific forums, industry-specific directories.
Online community participation and community management as the conversant authority in subject-specific domains is very important – leverage the SME "star power" of employees, engineers, key and public experts (carefully optimize their profiles as part of the overall brand strategy, though only with appropriate training and employee participation).
Online community engagement will happen via the corporate website (i.e. onsite forums, polls, etc.) AND offsite (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, industry boards, etc.) – keywords must be coordinated yet refined per the nature and cadence of the channel.
Online engagement will very likely result in "offline" communication (i.e. emails, phone calls, meetings, conferences) – so the same keyword-based messages, phrases, one-liners should be coordinated across marketing & communications channels, and "offline" events need to be precisely coordinated with online marketing tactics.

These insights are based on our long experience in the industry, serving B2C, B2B AND B2G (Government) clients. Contact us for more information, discussion or to find out how to apply these concepts to your online digital marketing objectives.

DC Area Foreclosure Assistance Mobile Text Service by CAFN

2011-11-30T05:30:00.000-08:00

Regional Community Service Announcement

TEXT HOME or CASA to 877-877

The Capital Area Foreclosure Network (CAFN) very recently announced the launch of a new foreclosure prevention text messaging service. The service will provide those in or worried about foreclosure with access to advice, reminders, and alerts through their mobile phones in either Spanish or English. The goals of the campaign are to increase the number of homeowners and renters that get help from a nonprofit housing counselor, and decrease the number of people who drop out of counseling.

TEXT HOME or CASA to 877-877

Parties can opt-in to the service by using their mobile device to text message HOME or CASA to 877-877, and will then immediately receive critical information and a hotline number to use when they are ready to connect to a counselor at a HUD approved counseling organization.

After opting in, mobile subscribers will receive periodic reminders, information about foreclosure prevention programs available in their jurisdiction, such as the new mediation programs in D.C. and Maryland, follow-up instructions, alerts to scams, financial literacy tips, and much more.

"We wanted to try a new way of getting our message across", said Peggy Sand, Director of the regional coalition. "Mobile phones are the most effective, easy and affordable way to connect with struggling residents."

Data from March 2011 shows that more than 9 percent of all loans (approximately 115,000 mortgages) in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area were in foreclosure or delinquent. Prince George’s County has been hit particularly hard by the crisis; approximately 5 percent of mortgages were in foreclosure and 15 percent were delinquent in the County as of March 2011. Studies show that homeowners that seek help from a certified nonprofit counselor have a better chance of avoiding foreclosure than homeowners who work alone.

"So many individuals who have lost their homes have fallen victim twice: first to predatory lenders and then to foreclosure rescue scam artists who promise they can save people’s homes, charge thousands of dollars, and do nothing to help" said Chuck Bean of the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington, who co-leads CAFN.

CAFN believes that adding a mobile-based initiative will provide wider access to DC, MD and Northern Virginia foreclosure community and government assistance for home foreclosure victims in the National Capital Region. The success of other mobile campaigns, like those responding to the earthquakes in Haiti and Text4baby, has been inspirational for many nonprofits. Moreover, according to a May 2010 Pew Report, 87% of Hispanic households have multiple mobile phones and use them more than any other personal or handheld technology. Thanks to a recent grant from Freddie Mac, CAFN can now connect with this audience in a familiar medium.

CAFN has designed the text messaging campaign to complement its other outreach initiatives, including a newly-redesigned interactive website (www.cafn.org) and a regional Spanish and English hotline (888-794-8830). Text messages will encourage users to contact the hotline so they can be referred to a nonprofit housing counselor, and will direct users to the website for additional information and resources on the foreclosure process.

The Capital Area Foreclosure Network (CAFN) is a Washington metropolitan area coalition that supports the work of nonprofit organizations, local governments and national partners working to help homeowners and renters facing foreclosure. CAFN is jointly led by the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

CONTACTS:

Peggy Sand, peggy@cafn.org / 202-390-9709
Steven Kania, skania@mwcog.org / 202-962-3249

GCN - Social Media Reaches Crossroads in Federal Government - Interview with Ted McLaughlan

2011-10-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a recent Government Computing News (GCN) article quoting Ted McLaughlan regarding how, though the Federal Government has embraced social media, hard realities of information management and security requirements may be slowing the love affair....

Contact Ted McLaughlan via LinkedIn for more information.

Shortening URLs - Where SEO and Taxonomy Collide

2011-09-16T08:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a question that seems to come up frequently, about shortening URLs for SEO…the answer isn't always the same,and there's usually a conflict between the SEO strategy and the overall information classification (taxonomy) design - so here's a thought process I've been through to help evaluate the approach for answering.

Question:

(Note the actual client details have been anonymized to protect the innocent.)

"Our URL strategy has been to use page titles as the end of URLs. So, the end of the URL for this item...

http://www.[yoursite].com/Research/[Research Category]/Studies/[Date]/Evaluating-the-Effectiveness-of-[Primary Keyphrase]

...matches the page title exactly ("Evaluating the Effectiveness of [Primary Keyphrase]")

Question is, is there any reason not to shorten the URLs when we create the items?

So, of instead of...

http://www.[yoursite].com/Research/[Research Category]/Studies/[Date]/Evaluating-the-Effectiveness-of-[Primary Keyphrase]

we might do...

http://www.[yoursite].com/Research/[Research Subject]/Studies/2011/evaluating-[Primary Keyphrase]

My understanding was that there was SEO value in using the actual page titles and that it was good to maintain a consistent URL structure. But does shortening URLs as I proposed above hurt us? Many of our URLs are very long, and it seems like that could be a liability for other reasons (more likely to get cut-off, less friendly on social-networking sites, etc.)."

Answer:

The very short answer to the question regarding shortening long URLs at this particular site (which is a very content-intensive, large site) is:
"No, shortening URLs like that doesn't hurt you, unless in doing so you confuse the user or search engines". So it's a "depends if" answer – but if you methodically walk through an impact analysis, the answer should be pretty clear.

What's the purpose of this page, who's the audience?

The purpose and intended audience drive the core keyword emphasis.

This particular page isn't entirely about the subject "evaluating the effectiveness of popular [Primary Keyphrase]" – rather, it's a landing page to convert readers (to sign up and download the real white paper).

This page isn't either about "evaluating" at all – it's about the actual effectiveness, the outcomes, the study, the results. Therefore, a keyword that should definitely be used more frequently in the page copy, plus in the tags and URL, is "effectiveness" or "outcome". The word "popular" isn't actually accurate or useful in this context – the text speaks to "widely adopted", the reasons for which may not have anything to do with "popularity" in the social sense. A broad study of [Primary Keyphrase] will obviously include those most utilized, unless there actually is some kind of "popularity" angle or perhaps the study is actually of more niche programs.
What's the primary topic, and its contextual relevance with respect to the site navigation?

The URLs, links and tags that support a page need to support the overall navigation structure and hierarchical topic scheme (i.e. taxonomy, or ontology) and lexicon of the site

The topic seems to be a "downloadable study of the effectiveness of most widely used [Primary Keyphrase]" – and as a "study", it rightly lives in the research section with a [Date] attribute. The word "studies" is a bit confusing, since the particular article is actually tagged a "white paper" in one place, yet categorized under "Study" in the faceted search navigation.

The fact that it's a "downloadable study" ought to be dealt with from an SEO perspective at a higher level, i.e. helping users find "all downloadable studies" – so the truly relevant semantic theme of this page that should be optimized is "effectiveness (or outcomes) of [Primary Keyphrase], as evidenced by a [Date] [Research Category] study". This semantic theme should be optimized in the text, and also in the tags and URL.

Note also that in reviewing various keyword combinations using the Google keyword search tool, the "[Primary Keyphrase]" (and its variants) are the only one that seem to get appreciable search traffic – so optimizing with many additional descriptors really isn't necessary from a competitive search results positioning perspective.
Is the URL simply too long or unmanageable, and can it actually be changed without disrupting the site design or configuration?

For a large, multi-level site, changing URLs and folder names can be difficult, especially if care isn't taken to stay true to the taxonomy and use 301-redirects for changes

The URL is very long, at least for users to type in (especially on mobile devices). The few instances of this link shared on the Internet is being done with URL shorteners, so that helps the viewer of the link – but doesn't help the "sharer" (though this link doesn't seem to be getting shared very much, which may be in some way related to the fact that it's somewhat hard to share).

It appears the last node of the URL can be changed relatively easily with the CMS; though the hierarchical nodes preceding probably cannot be changed easily without disrupting the site's overall taxonomy design.

Therefore, with the above considerations, the URL is probably most effectively and efficiently rewritten as:

"http://www.[yoursite].com/Research/[Research Category]/Studies/[Date]/[Primary Keyphrase]-outcomes"

Note all the broad and narrow keywords that truly describe this content are represented:

- research
- [research category]
- study/studies
- [Primary Keyphrase]
- outcomes

Regarding the broader question of whether ALL long URLs should attempt to be shortened

We've just determined that this particular URL could be shortened a little, mainly for semantic reasons – but this level of shortening won't buy very much here in what seems to be a relatively non-competitive search topic.

Some other URLs should probably be REALLY shortened, if the intent of the site owner is that the page should be heavily marketed, shared, and the page's topic is a very primary, current and competitive keyword. For example, if [Yoursite.com] had been very focused on selling their "[Keyphrase] Diagnostic" tool, the advice would be to shorten the URL from its current taxonomy-driven long form, to a short and sweet:

"http://www.[yoursite].com/[Keyphrase]-Tool"

If this is the case for particular URLs, that need highly-converting sales and marketing exposure, then there do exist technical mechanisms to "rewrite" the page URLs (outside of the CMS structure) so that they're much shorter and easier to digest.

Socially-Semantic Markup – Link Facebook and Google Plus (+1) to Your Website

2011-08-31T09:44:00.000-07:00

A primary objective of work in designing and deploying websites is to enable an evolved online user experience, for human users of the website. For many websites and their owners, the core website is also a source of information, marketing messages and social dialogue that lives elsewhere. "Elsewhere" can mean any Internet-enabled channel, from social media like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, to Search Engines, RSS feed networks, Directories, eCommerce platforms, Mobile Apps and content syndication engines.

In short, a website deployment should, as standard practice, assume the web content to be mobile and accessible (in part or in whole) from many other places – and therefore should be as accurate, optimized and standards-based as possible. A website should not only be a destination, but a source of content fragments and descriptors that "carry the flag" around the Internet, to search engines and social media networks, while working hard to escort users back.

This is especially important for an eCommerce portal or website, when selling discrete product or services (for which there are already common vocabularies). It's especially important if the eCommerce website is designed to deliver a great User Experience (UX) as well, incorporating a lot of helpful content, tools and sometimes off-topic content as well as the core product data.

It's well known that the actual website content should be optimized to find exactly what a user needs, convince them to engage or buy, as well as convince the search engines to rank highly for target products. This optimization is driven by a mix of "usability", "accessibility", "performance optimization" and "SEO" techniques. Achieving this mix isn't horribly difficult, but does require professional experience and a healthy understanding of the site's business objectives, underlying technology and online "neighborhood" (i.e. its competitors, partners, detractors).

Semantics For Search Engines

Focusing on search engines, it's imperative to make every content fragment or page on a website, whether it lives only on the site or is copied/syndicated elsewhere, as semantically accurate as possible. By "semantically-accurate", I mean the topics and focused intent of the content are crystal clear (i.e. "machine-readable") and aligned with standardized vocabularies. This includes any intentions related to "persuasion" or "marketing". Note that ALL search engines are interested in as much semantically-accurate information as can be provided; this includes Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blekko – many search engines out there.

To be semantically-accurate for search engines, it boils down to the visible, unstructured web content plus the non-visible structured web content – one supporting the other.

For the visible content, this is generally a straightforward Search Engine Optimization and Marketing (SEO/SEM) exercise; determining the right keywords and their optimal use on the web page and offsite content that links back, including "alt" and "text" tags, coding good HTML markup (i.e. "header" tags, bolding and other decorations), using text instead of graphics for keywords, making sure scripts and other code are well-programmed and perform well, and taking advantage of descriptors like "Meta Tags" (i.e. "Title" and "Description") that show up in search engine results of the website.

The non-visible structured web content to be concerned with focuses these days on the new Schema.org semantic markup standards. While many standards have been evolving around adding semantic descriptors to web programming languages, like Microdata, Microformats and RDFa, "Schema.org" is a search-engine driven attempt to "normalize" (aggregate and standardize) the most useful vocabularies (useful by the search engine vendor standards). Basically, standard words and categories are embedded as non-visible HTML code within the existing HTML tags, to help search engines understand (and convey accurately to searchers, for example using "Snippets" in the search results) precisely the focus and intent of the surrounding web copy. Note that as more web projects move to using HTML5, using structured semantic markup will become easier.

Take a web page that speaks to a particular product, with pricing information. The page may include several indicators of price (specials, coupons, 2 for 1, etc.), but the search engine would like to display for shoppers what the true price really is (helping with apples-to-apples comparison shopping). The HTML code may be:

Price: $499

Adding some markup around this (and only this, on this particular page), will tell the search engines that $499 is the real, for sure price:

Price: $499

There's a bit more detail to learn about using this kind of markup, and the "Google Webmaster Rich Snippets Testing Tool" can parse your page and show what the search results focus will be, using this semantic markup.

Semantics For Social Media

To many website owners, participating in social media frequently means not much more than the "AddThis" button, highlighting a litany of chicklets with logos of many social networks. While this may encourage or enable users to actually share the webpage information into their other communities, it doesn't enable any communities to "reach into" and interpret the website (and their members' opinions of it) for themselves. Enter the "Like" and Google "+1" buttons.

Placing these visible buttons on your site certainly enables users to "fave" it, plus show them how popular it might be to their other friends and co-workers. Adding some additional non-visible semantic markup to your site will help the Facebook and Google+ tools understand precisely what your site is about, when exposed in these communities.

For Facebook, the additional markup is in their own "Open Graph" format, which is a semantic vocabulary with descriptors that establish a website or page as a "Social Object". (Check your page markup with the Facebook Linter .)Basically, Facebook can tell its community about your site (through search results, "likes", sharing), in a way that's very useful and friendly to its community. A set of core tags are (space added for rendering):

< meta property="og:title" content="Title of your webpage or site"/>
< meta property="og:site_name" content="Name of the website"/>
< meta property="og:type" content="Type of thing or topic the website is about"/>
< meta property="og:email" content="Contact email"/>
< meta property="og:phone_number" content=" Contact phone"/>
< meta property="og:locality" content=" Contact town/city/neighborhood"/> (note, lots of "address" descriptors available)
< meta property="og:image" content="Image about your site you want people to see"/>
< meta property="fb:admins" content="The primary Facebook contact for this site"/>

For Google, the additional markup is in Schema.org format, and amounts to some Header Meta tags in addition to the "Plus 1" javascript code (to actually see and use the +1 button). The Meta tags reinforce the focus of a user's intention of using the +1 button, telling Google precisely what you want the +1 community to know about the page from their friends' recommendation (Google calls this "+Snippets"). This may be a little different than the core marketing messages supported by SEO, and therefore a little different than the content in the traditional Metatags. The basic tags are:

< meta itemprop="name" content="Name of your site or webpage">
< meta itemprop="description" content="What's on your site or webpage">
< meta itemprop="image" content="a nice image to socialize about your site or webpage">

Note that Google's +Snippets will actually use Facebook OpenGraph markup if it's already available, i.e. "og:title,image,description".

To Do's

So, if you're building a new website or upgrading an old one (especially for eCommerce or B2C sites), be sure to consider the following to maximize BOTH search engine results for your product AND exposure within online social communities:

SEO your site, plus your external content and social media profiles - visible AND non-visible elements.
Determine what you'd like to really highlight, perhaps just your business, perhaps products or services….generate the Schema.org-compatible markup for these – try http://schema-creator.org/ to help.
Work with your Website Programmer and Information Architect to determine how best to insert this “structured markup language”, in a way that enhances and supports the parallel SEO techniques, yet complies with the site's design and technology. Test it. Note that many Web Content Management (WCM) providers haven't yet made this easy to do – so check with the vendor.
Find a way to use the "Like" and "G+" buttons, and insert them on your site – especially for products or information you feel would benefit from widespread, public socialization; sometimes it’s best to use these where the site’s personality really shows through, like on the "About Us" or "Contact Us" page.

Navigation Arts can help with your website content optimization and interactive marketing strategies, for search engine, social media and other digital channel exposure. Contact me for more information.

SOA-UX, Services-Oriented User Experience Design Architecture

2011-05-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

During a recent solution strategy session for a very large enterprise, a need developed for creating visual prototypes and simulations illustrating the end-state of the enterprise system to be built. The system, or really "solution" (since the ROI would be derived not only from IT, but also from organization change, process re-engineering, physical and digital asset value realization) included many audiences and stakeholder roles plus many distinct (though integrated) business services. "Services" is the key term here, i.e. not "applications" or "websites" – customers would find and use these business services offered by the company, governed with managed agreements and supported by information technology.

The best practice SOA methodologies separate business concerns from underlying fulfillment concerns, in a manner that enables reuse and evolution of each – maximizing ROI (hopefully). Business service architecture strategies begin frequently with the "What" (what is the scope and nature of the business service offered), the "Who" (who are the participants in the service agreement) and operate constrained by the "Why" (i.e., the ROI objectives drive performance measures and limitations, KPIs, etc.). "How", "when", "where", "which" and all other implementation questions follow these first three concerns.

For netcentric services, i.e. those business services intended to be delivered leveraging networked, digital technologies and content (like websites), the User Experience (UX) should be considered both in the strategy and business requirements (i.e. it’s part of the "What", and helps define the "Who" and "Why"), and in the implementation (i.e. UX design tasks, artifacts, deliverables). "Great-UX" is a corporate asset, and a positive, useful "experience" (regardless of the specific tasks or processes executed) is itself a business service. As Navigation Arts puts it, "user experience is the only sustainable competitive advantage a business can employ in the online world today".

Therefore, a successful online capability created with SOA principles requires early UX insight, and a successful UX is best associated with an SOA approach to the business service design. Best practices in SOA and UX are inexorably linked for successful online services. UX is both a governance mechanism (i.e. a set of standards, methods, guidelines) and is itself a business service.

So, in constructing a services architecture to fulfill business objectives, the first step includes Services Identification, usually approached from a "Business Domain" perspective. Let’s say the Domain is "Customer Support", and the business objective is to enable more customers to derive value from ongoing support dialogue. This objective should lower the number of commonly-repeated service requests and decrease the time it takes for the company’s stakeholders to alert the company to "root-cause" information concerning incidents (i.e. customers may find they have similar problems, and offer different, additional information after viewing what others are discussing). The new business service is "online self-service knowledge management", or from the Marketing Team perspective, the "Social Help Desk".

This business service has a few subordinate, composite services (i.e. that themselves are made up of multiple, more granular services), like an automated process for "incident discovery and alerting", a manual "live chat" service, and an application component to "search for issues like yours". Note the developing inventory and relationship of services isn’t constrained by or prescribing specific technology – though the end-state definition of the service will be informed by the technology context (i.e. define something we can actually buy or build, within budget and compliance).

The roles involved at this stage of an SOA project include those like "Solution Architect", "Enterprise Architect", "Business Architect" and "SOA or Functional Architect" – all helping to identify layers (to comparable abstraction) of reusable, independently-governed and measurable service that make sense in the overall Enterprise investment context.

What about the business service "provide a great customer experience" (i.e. provide "Great-UX")? This is certainly a measurable business objective, and should be a service that supports the successful delivery of service like "Live Chat". Unless Great-UX is the actual, independent outcome to be delivered (as in entertainment and advertising), Great-UX is a service component of the broader, composite business services. The "live chat" service may include a tailored "Great-UX" service, for example.

But what is this "Great-UX" service made of? For live chat, it may include reusable items, like common branding, buttons, navigation anchors or feedback signals. It may also include custom UX elements for this specific business service, like a Chat window frame design, a "click-to-share" interactive metaphor, or a "communications status" dashboard interface, not found anywhere else in the overall provision of the Social Help Desk.

The important thing to consider in the definition and initial design approach of UX services, is that UX services are both mapped effectively to the corresponding definitions of the business services, and are themselves defined with reuse in mind (included likely instances of unintended use, for example in third-party applications or syndicated channels).

SOA-UX, delivered.

Corporate Knowledge Management Applied to Online Customer Engagement

2011-05-19T06:00:00.001-07:00

There’s certainly no shortage of stories regarding customer engagement and social media interactivity by many businesses on the Internet, especially when responding to negative feedback and proactively shaping the amplified, echo-chamber public dialogue that follows.

PR and marketing staff may be tuned to trending commentary through "social listening" tools, search engine alerts and direct monitoring of inbound call center or emailed sentiment. However, especially with businesses that sell quite sophisticated or complex goods and services, it can be really difficult to find and assign – quickly - the right SMEs to evaluate and help respond to quickly growing community sentiment or complaints. SMEs who not only explicitly understand the product, but who also may have valuable, tacit understanding of the intersecting contexts – i.e. how the product's being used, the nature of the user community, and perhaps some knowledge of implicit product use guidelines (that don't show up in the instruction manual).

How can this be addressed? On the one hand, the situation calls for some kind of "expertise management" capability, where SMEs around the company are routinely, digitally profiled via categorized knowledge, and this information is available real-time via search or faceted navigation. Or maybe Hal knows, down in the IT Department – so just call him.

On the other hand, it's only a sharp and informed social Tweeter that can separate the bottom-line concerns and issues from the noise and opinion, and classify the conversation for the organization in a way that enables the most effective response and applied corporate intellect. In other words, to engage the public community in the most contextually relevant and accurate way – thereby shortening the "hype cycle", diluting the angst, solving the right problem.

So the customer relationship Tweeter or Blogger needs to quickly package and convey the right query to the most appropriate SME, to help elicit the best response. Implementation of a few knowledge management concepts can help. For example, within your company, perhaps information is being "semantically tagged" - identified with additional contextual value by pre-defined taxonomies of terms associated via file metadata or a content tagging index. As the information gets tagged (not only documents, but expertise profiles, conversations, multimedia), it would probably be very useful to enable tagging not only according to pre-defined corporate taxonomies, but also in free-form (i.e. building an organic folksonomy). As well, tagging should be encouraged for "dialogue instances" – i.e. blog entries and comments, bulletin board entries, intranet or wiki page updates, etc.

For the Tweeter searching for internal SMEs, this may result in a much closer match between the external issue topic and the internal expertise, because the lexicon is more semantically accurate or inclusive. A search within the standard corporate repository for "customer software release X defects" might turn up testing parameters or results from the software development lifecycle (keying off the standard terms "software", "release" and "defects"), but a search for "the stupid XX page loses my address when I hit the recalculate button" (per the complainant) might just turn up some salient internal dialogue and references among developers about this particular "feature" (or similar ones), keying off the user-supplied tags "recalculate", "button", "address" and "XX page". Maybe even "stupid", as a signal emanating from a commonly problematic area.

The unstructured dialogue instances are also bound to be easier to interpret and verify (since real experts are involved), as to whether the issue smells like a widespread problem, or it's a short-lived, one-time issue. As well, additional material may be identified that’s easy to consume and understand by customers, adding up to support for an online customer and community engagement process that's more helpful and credible.

Google Rich Snipping of Microdata, Microformats or RDFa for SEO and CTRs

2011-04-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

Google’s increasing emphasis this year on its “Rich Snippets” program (an observation obtained directly from one of their Client Account Managers) should encourage businesses, and especially local vendors and eCommerce merchants, to start using additional “semantic markup” for their HTML. “Semantic markup” is additional tagging (or labels) using structured data that are added to help parsers and programs that read your webpage to understand truly what specific content areas or fragments are about. Google currently supports labels about reviews, people profiles, products, business listings, recipes, and events. The labels are invisible to users, but not to search engines.

For example, a local business that states it’s located at “123 Reston Drive, Florida City, California” – might drive search engines or 3rd-party location apps a little nutty trying to figure out where it is. Likewise, a single product page may have testimonial content associated with both the product, and the company; which should show up as review summary in the search results?

Note – this blog entry only barely scratches the surface of years of debate, research and evolution of these semantic constructs and standards…there’s plenty to discuss, argue and find more information about at other sources, including Google.

Rich Snippets are the little gray text fragments that show up in Google place pages and search results, right under the title of the result and before the description of the page’s content (which itself is dynamically-assembled according to a number of inputs). The Rich Snippet text is assembled by Google (according to its own proprietary algorithms) from the Semantic Markup that’s applied within the page…using one of three currently recognized HTML extension standards: RDFa, Microdata and Microformats. Within these standard syntaxes, there are many vocabularies to use – for example, a rapidly-growing RDFa standard vocabulary for product descriptions is the “GoodRelations” vocabulary, whereas Google has created its own “Merchant Product Taxonomy” as a standard vocabulary for use with Microdata syntax.

These three standards are basically ways to describe (i.e. a “syntax”) specific concepts using standard or custom vocabularies. RDFa (Resource Description Framework – in attributes) is very powerful for use in web documents, but not specifically designed for common HTML usage (it enables extensions for XHTML documents only), so can be challenging to use across all the varying types of web pages on the Internet. Microformats were initially created to enable additional semantic labeling of HTML/XHTML documents for expressing contact info, geographic positions, calendar events, relationships, etc. You may have heard of “hCalendars” and “hCards” – these are Microformats used by many Internet products and search engines, including Facebook. Microformats have been leveraged to create a new syntax called Microdata, very closely associated with the development of the new HTML5 standard.

Wikipedia puts the relationship among the three standards very succinctly: “Microdata can be viewed as an extension of the existing microformat idea which attempts to address the deficiencies of microformats without the complexity of systems such as RDFa.”

Any of these can be used to markup HTML pages to influence Google’s Rich Snippets, and therefore enhance user experience, clickthrough likeliness and search results – but it appears that at this time, Google’s support of Microdata, the close association of the Microdata open standard with HTML5 evolution, and Microdata’s ease of use (in my own opinion) makes it a best choice at this time. This is, however, a best choice for marking up pages to ease findability on the web via Search Engines, and especially to enhance click-through-rates (CTRs) from Google - and may not be the best choice for other website intentions, audiences or 3rd-party interactions.

Actually implementing Microdata isn't too rigorous, for a few individual site pages - but if your site uses a CMS or has many product pages, that change often, it's important to establish a bit of a templated approach to the HTML tags utilized. Try not to add Microdata to any HTML that's hidden from users (except with meta tags), try to avoid adding additional SPAN or DIV tags (look for reusable DIVs or Section markers that are constant across pages), and be sure to consider which tags may change frequently (like monthly price specials), so your design takes this into account. Altogether, this is another reason, when designing or redesigning your web presence, to first carefully plan and design your Information Architecture, inclusive of the vocabularies to use in semantic markup.

Digital Asset ROI for the Entire IT Enterprise - Analytics Aren't Just For Websites

2011-03-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

The use of website analytics and reporting software isn’t new to most website owners. Tracking and analyzing the usage of your website by people and search engine ‘bots are obviously essential activities for validating your investment. Typical metrics tracked include number of visits by various user types, number of downloads or access to particular content, and navigation routes most commonly taken by visitors to, through, and out of your site. These metrics, perhaps aggregated into meaningful reports (i.e. overall unique visits per month), tell you how your site is performing. But are these reports evaluated for the impact or opportunities they reveal with respect to your entire IT budget? In other words, do your web analytic reports support “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs) for your entire IT Investment portfolio, not just the website maintenance budget?

If your answer to this is “no”, your overall organizational IT investment may not be properly balanced to deliver the maximum ROI from your website, resulting in a lot of money left on the table and accumulation of very real business risk.

Let’s say your analytics show a dramatic increase in conversions by users completing a particular website form and uploading the required attachments. This is good news: the marketing and SEO folks have done their job, and more users are signing up and paying for the services offered. Plus, the analytics indicate that users are spending a lot more time before and after the conversion on your site – i.e. the “bounce rates” are getting lower (or “dwell” times are getting higher) for the pages that support the conversions. Revenues are growing, feedback is good, a bit of positive press and “earned media” (i.e. positive social commentary) is generated. All is good.

What are the KPIs here? Typical website managers, translating system utilization metrics to immediate business value indicators, might categorize their metrics as supporting goals and KPIs like:

1. Higher Conversions per User (i.e. our “stickiness” campaign is working, with value perceived in upsells, cross-sells, good recurring value in subscriptions);

2. Lower Conversion Abandonment (i.e. we’re making it easier to close the sale, once the decision to buy is made); and

3. Lower Cost per Conversion – this is an indicator that is based on specific, additional cost factors (beyond fixed expenses, like an ad network buy) incurred to drive particular kinds of traffic and conversions.

Typical response to these KPIs usually begins and ends with website investment. For example, if KPI (1) is trending low, there probably needs to be more compelling opportunities for cross-sells on the landing pages, or simply better “combined” value described for multiple products. If KPI (2) is trending higher, your online form or payment gateway is either due for redesign, or there’s a serious bug in the application. Continue reading more here about Digital Asset Enterprise ROI at Navigation Arts.

Washington DC Social Media Outlook 2011 - Potomac TechWire Summary

2011-03-05T05:01:00.000-08:00

Social Media prognostications are always fun to consider, and try (if there’s a Beta version) – but today’s Potomac TechWire "Social Media Outlook 2011" breakfast was all business, with true ROI. As a Rohit Bhargava put it, “what’s the ROI of attending this meeting?” It’s the “social” ROI, vs. the “media” ROI – and it’s actually not that hard to categorize and track.

The general consensus by presenters and the panel boiled down to a few key topics for businesses to consider, learn more about, and take action upon – here’s a few important ones.

(1) It’s true that there’s a tremendous actual and potential benefit for businesses in utilizing the “2 ½” major social media platforms, i.e. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But it’s equally true, that there’s likely equivalent benefit available in leveraging other social media channels and services that are similar to or actually integrated with “the mothership”. For example, using Quora for some knowledge research by audience segment, and the associated expansion of knowledge presence (on the Web) that provoking thoughtful Q & A might bring. Signing in to Quora with one’s Twitter or Facebook ID, automatically kicks off some relationship networking and associations that significant increase exposure on Quora.

(2) Organizations really need to better understand and shape their online dialogue according to purpose, audience, originating department (i.e. area of the company) and with appropriate leverage of “social currency”. For example, B2B target customers probably wouldn’t be interested in or motivated to “like” a product or service article posted on the corporate blog by the interactive marketing team, but they probably would be interested in “following” a hashtag-categorized commentary on Twitter that’s associated with a product implementation case study, moderated by a Tweeter from the engineering department.

(3) While it’s extremely important to have some appropriately-designed and resourced presence on the majors (i.e. FB/TW/LI), it’s equally important to have a firm understanding and management of the “hub” of your corporate digital media activities. At the end of the day, companies and services like Twitter and Google aren’t yours; they own the data, and they may change or fail for reasons you don’t control. As well, without a “hub and spoke” mentality to distributing and monitoring digital media and conversation, economies of scale are lost across the whole lifecyle – from content authoring, to optimization, to application of policies and rules, to tagging, to distributing, to analyzing…

It’s a wise strategy to consider building a corporate digital presence “hub” with digital engagement technologies that you own and maintain (like a very dynamic and integrated Blog), from which your categorized and optimized digital conversations and assets are distributed, syndicated, and supported (from a feedback, analytics and quality perspective). In other words, your Facebook page shouldn’t be your primary corporate hub and branding vehicle.

By far the best quote came from Addie Connor of the Washington Post’s “SocialCode” Facebook agency – (in response to a CFO’s concern about whether “buying” Fans was fiscally responsible) “with the right ROI, you’ll buy fans all day long”.

Thanks to the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, and BIA Kelsey for sponsoring this event.

Online, Interactive Digital Engagement Governance – Building a Content Governance 2.0 Strategy and Community

2011-02-24T09:34:00.000-08:00

This will be the first in an ongoing set of entries about Interactive Digital Engagement Governance. Contact me or Navigation Arts in McLean, VA for more information, or for ideas regarding planning and implementing such a methodology at your organization.

The concept of governance isn’t new at all to organizations building websites, whether inside (as with intranets and corporate portals) or exposed to the public. Simply put, the creation and management of web-enabled content requires everyday guidance for those who manage the content, and a process for assessing impact and making decisions about website and content issues. This guidance can come from roles-based training, online help and instruction, content management processes and policies. But how to you start an online governance effort in a Web 2.0 context - what’s the methodology?

Let’s be clear on the scope – we’re talking about governing the entirety of your online presence and digital engagement with constituents; i.e. all the people and systems (i.e. “Actors”) who engage with your content, through various channels. This includes employees, through use of your internal websites as well as their activities on the Internet, participating in social media, uploading content, creating bookmarks. This includes the content management lifecyle, not only as content is authored, reviewed and published – but also as the content is subject to feedback, discussion, monetization, syndication, repurposing and other extended use.

Governing your online digital assets can get very complex and expensive, very fast – especially as it’s released on the Internet, where it’s subject to countless forms of intended or unintended use. Blogs, RSS feeds, iFrames, email, content scraping, URL shorteners – list goes on and on with respect to the devices of torture your content might be subjected to, in public.

The repercussions of NOT governing your online content, both behind and outside of the firewall, can be equally complex and expensive. Therefore, we need a reasonably affordable, though comprehensive and scalable online digital engagement governance methodology – to build a repeatable, executable governance model that actually works.

Some of the background for this emerging methodology, in its various flavors, comes from many years of Intranet and Public Portal, Content Management and Social Media implementation for various Government Agencies and commercial entities. Common issues emerge from all of these past implementations, as they’re faced with intersection of the Web 2.0 channels.

Here’s a proposed methodology in a nutshell:

Create the Governance Business Case
Confirm the Governance Model
Create a Governance Plan
Establish Governance Requirements
Establish Governance Authorities
Validate and Socialize
Implement and Monitor
Evolve

“Governance” is essentially an integrated capability, i.e. something that an organization uses for its benefit that has a defined scope in terms of roles and organization, processes, information assets, tools and investment. Compare to other capabilities an organization might establish, like “Information Assurance”, “Application Development” or “IT Support”. Governance is a multi-faceted capability, implemented in different ways according to the context. For example, the context of “IT Support” has its own set of governance requirements; a good methodology and set of models exists with ITIL. The context here is the management of web-enabled digital content as it’s exposed to people, systems and their online dialogue. Interactive Digital Engagement.

To successfully create the Governance capability, a Business Case is required. This documents the scope of the capability, lays out the resource needs and estimates, aligns the investment requirements with the rest of the organization, and most importantly, describes how benefits are recognized and reported. The business case will help support reasonable investment, within corporate constraints, and clearly indicate how performance will be assessed.

Note that there are two main scopes of performance for the Governance program. First are the benefits it conveys to other programs; for example, “reduction of risk profile indicators” (Program Management), “reduction of negative complaints” (Customer Support), “increase in search engine visibility” (Online Marketing). Second is the performance of the actual Governance capability, i.e. “decrease in number of content policy violations” and “decrease in number of policy-related decision escalations”.

What’s the “Governance Model”, then, that will support the Business Case, and will drive implementation of the capability? It’s an organized set of governance components and relationships that need to be created, and that will function in an integrated manner. While your governance model will obviously be customized to your environment, the high-level facets should include:

The Authorities (i.e. Policies, Guidelines, Business Rules, etc.)
The Organization & Roles (i.e. the Governance Executives, Content Managers, etc.)
The Processes (i.e. Escalation, Impact Assessment, Decision-Making, Policy Updates, etc.)
The Governed Elements (i.e. what is governed; Actors, Content, Processes, Interfaces, Functions)
Governance Tools (i.e. what do people use within processes to help achieve governance, like forums, libraries, guides, FAQs, workflow monitors, etc.)

So, to execute the methodology and implement this capability, we need a Governance Plan. The Plan basically outlines how, when and with what resources the methodology will be invoked. Straightforward project planning, and it’s obviously important the project plan align with the overall organization investment planning. It’s also equally important that a portion of the Plan is aligned with implementation or management of a “Governed Element”; for example, rolling out governance with implementation of a new web channel, or aligned with release of a set of new content.

This essentially enables “prototyping” of the governance model with real feedback; there’s really not a good way to test a governance capability like this without engagement of actual stakeholders in an uncontrolled setting.

The beginning of the Plan will focus on Governance Requirements – these are functional and non-functional (i.e. performance, availability, security) requirements for the building and operation of the governance model – obviously traceable back to the Business Case. Requirements should also include some Use Cases and perhaps a Test Approach – i.e., examples of how this governance model will actually work, in real-life settings. As well, requirements should provide some focus on the specific kinds of “governed elements” addressed – like blog comments, uploaded documents, 3rd-party forums, content distribution processes, community groups. This exercise will help shape and detail the Plan for implementation, and inform other stakeholders (like the IT Community, the HR Department, Legal, etc.) – that that their help and input can be appropriately harnessed.

Governance Requirements will shape and help create new Governance Authorities. While the Requirements drive implementation of the Governance Model, the Authorities express the limits, rules, guidance that people need to operate effectively within it. Many existing authorities probably are relevant (like corporate legal, communications, security or systems lifecycle policies), but many will likely need to be updated or created as a result of this initiative. Types of authorities include:

Mission Statement
Copyright Laws
Laws regarding Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines
Community Principles
Policies
Mandates
Standard Operating Procedures
Terms of Service
Business Rules
Training Guides
Online FAQs/Help
Voting

Future postings will continue to explore this Interactive Digital Engagement Governance Methodology, focusing on Validating and Socializing the Governance Model, Implementing and Monitoring it, and ultimately Evolving it.

Socialized Coupons in DC - Classified Advertising Living in Groups

2011-02-13T04:45:00.000-08:00

Groupon and Living Social and What's the Deal are all the rage on the frontier of online advertising, representing the most successful of the quickly-growing pack of "social group coupon" merchants. They're a very popular mashup of a number of well-known online marketing techniques, implemented in a way that clearly separates them from traditional banner ads, coupon clubs or classified advertising - they're fun, feel exclusive, count on social buzz and absolutely real savings to succeed. No doubt these kinds of coupons are valuable to the users (50% off a nice dinner out? - pretty good deal); but are they beneficial to the merchants? While the ROI jury has initially spoken regarding the value of the business plan (see Google's recent offer for Groupon, and the global waves of "copycat" enterprises popping up quicker than the last wave of eBay lookalikes) - the Jury's still out with respect to reliable ROI for the merchants actually offering these "deals".

A "social group coupon" is basically a highly-discounted deal that's available typically for limited amounts and time, is highly focused and advertised online to a target demographic, and is available only after a certain threshold of people commit to buy. The value to consumers is inescapable - by simply joining a group of like-minded coupon-clippers (providing your email, and some optional demographic info), and perhaps "spreading the word" a bit while chit-chatting in Facebook or Twitter, your virtual "flash virtual coupon mob" wins the deal - ostensibly a deal that's real, since the groupthink deems it so. Who else wins?

Taking Groupon as an example, the Dealmakers and their investors win - they'll get over 50% of the amount paid by consumers for the deal, along with continued "word of mouth" free advertising among a growing, "opt-in" fan base and email list (very valuable). These deals show up not only in emails and the Groupon site, but also on affiliate sites and networks - other popular websites whose owners get paid a little to show the deals. To orchestrate the affiliate activity, "affiliate merchants" are involved (like Commission Junction), who take a little from the Dealmaker for this service - so they win, too. The affiliates win - deals that show up on websites, in twitter feeds and other advertising channels (promoted by the affiliates themselves) can be attractive enough and promoted smartly (these 2 factors aren't given) as to draw new traffic and cross-selling opportunities to the affiliates. The payment gateways win - obviously most payments occur online through Visa, PayPal, Google Checkout, whatever - all of whom take another little cut (as do some of the Dealmakers).

Here's an example of a local affiliate channel in DC/Northern Virginia - Northern Virginia Business Deals.

What about the Merchant, offering the deal? Death of a deal by a thousand cuts, or is it really helpful?

The deals are carefully constructed business transactions, pure and simple, implemented in a way that above all else maximizes ROI for the Dealmaker, and takes advantage of any market advantages that come available - like "clout" and unique reach among demographics, first-to-market positioning and exclusivity, efficiencies in affiliate management, etc. It's really pure business, no play - regardless of the "community spin" that's promoted (though there are some local entrants that do actually give back, like Amy's Offers in Loudoun County, VA, giving back some of their proceeds to the local "Unsung Educators Scholarship"). The bigger players offer less to individual merchants, presumably because their services are worth so much more - while the newer entrants may offer more, at lower cost - since they're willing to do more to build their base of attractive merchants, offers and community traffic.

The prize is many hundreds of immediate purchases of the coupon, with volume revenue overcoming the profit discount, hopefully at a price-point for fulfillment that is both expected and can be absorbed without "crashing the system", so to speak. In other words, lots of new repeat customers for perhaps a little profit or maybe just more guarantee of future profit - and you've got enough stock to cover the one-time deal.

Let's consider the benefits to merchants of some of the primay social group coupon dealmakers in the Washington DC/Northern Virginia area (note that these are vendor-supplied statistics at this time, and generalizations based on a variety of merchant-driven interactions; actual negotiations and final contracts will be very unique to the deal - KME Internet Marketing in Northern Virginia can help sort these out).

Groupon's deals with local merchants go out through an email list of over 650,000 subscribers and its affiliate network, the deal must be at least 50% of original retail, redemption rates exceed 80% and the revenue is split 50-50. The heavyweight in this area, they drive a strong non-compete agreement, waits can be long to get "in-cycle", and their approval of the actual deal may be inflexible, as it's driven by their own very detailed analytics for success.

LivingSocial.com has about 1/6th the number of subscribers, a slightly higher redemption rate, and the negotiation tends to be more flexible - quicker merchant payment, less exclusivity required without "non-compete" agreement, more likely to try new deals with new demographics (while all of these sites typically started with the young, urban tech-savvy set - they all seem to be quickly adopted by the soccer-moms and suburbanites - the same kind of trending for most new social media tools).

SoWhatstheDeal.com (by the Washingtonian magazine folks) is very local, has about 1/3 of Living Social's subscribers, but seems extremely flexible in competing for business - they are, however, still very focused on the very young, urban set (20-30), with all kinds of additional social interaction to support the marketing, including raffles and weekly events.

There are also many other new variations of "Groupon clones" out there, like Homerun, Deals for Deeds, Specialicious (from the Northern Virginia Magazine folks), Eversave and Socially Ideal. Heck, you can start your own group buying initiative, for less than a thousand dollars (to buy clone scripting software, optimize it, and get started on the marketing).

There also exist a flurry of "pseudo-clones", that aren't quite social group coupons, but social-media marketed traditional coupons - for example "CheapLocalDeals" as displayed on local media like the Loudoun Times, which is simply a traditional affiliate pay-per-click (PPC) banner ad channel (like Google's Adsense), for which the Merchant pays a fee per click or conversion (i.e. somewhat like Google's Adwords), and the affiliate network (i.e. CheapLocalDeals and the Times) each get their cut. "Socializing" the deal includes the efforts by the affiliate network to boost word-of-mouth advertising and visibility through SEO, email subscription-list building, and other online marketing tactics - all to ensure a more qualified and durable set of eyeballs who will likely click, purchase, enjoy and tell their friends about it.

Local merchants can certainly succeed, and succeed wildly by leveraging this new advertising medium - but also fail badly in overall ROI if it isn't considered an integrated portion of the overall online marketing effort. Within a planned online marketing budget, how should use of social group coupons be included? Consider the major online marketing expenses to be balanced:

social group coupons
paid banner ads and links
paid article and contextual ad placements, on websites, games, mobile, etc.
paid press releases (i.e. ads in news clothing)
paid classified ads and community-centric notices
paid online engagement marketing, i.e. onsite and offsite social media ads & presence (like in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
paid search engine optimization (SEO)
paid search engine marketing (SEM), i.e. pay-per-click (PPC) via search engines
paid multimedia ad placement (i.e. in Videos)
online marketing web design and content for your own site, mobile apps, landing pages and offsite interactive profiles and presence (check out NavigationArts in DC for help here)
...and so on

It's enough to make the owner of the marketing budget's head spin - especially for a small merchant, without the effective resources to track integrated performance across all these advertising channels, and balance investment against outcome. Sometimes jumping on the hype-cycle is simply a one-time investment necessary to test it out or join the game...but the hype-cycle is probably past for social group coupons, and a more methodical approach is warranted to drive the right kind of value. This applies not only to the Merchant advertisers, but also to media publishers (i.e. website owners, like Newspapers) who must balance their own coupon/classifieds community-building efforts with syndication of others that might add value, like Groupon and Living Social.

If you're a Merchant seeking help to sort out these online advertising options, including the new wave of social group coupons, drop a line here...

Interactive Design Requires IT Solution Architectures

2010-12-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

In the world of online, interactive design, it’s not always clear when the business/interaction designing ends and the IT development begins – or for that matter, how much development is really needed. Even though the project plan might be very clear, governance requirements of the Enterprise IT environment can drive a chicken-or-egg scenario.

While you can’t really finalize the detailed IT design and specifications until the visual design, functional requirements and information architecture are complete…these elements do need to be informed very early and often by some concrete IT direction and constraints in order to be realistic and actually capable of meeting the business requirements. IT investments to support your project also need to be confirmed as early as possible (for example if a new CMS platform is needed), since the lead time for approving, paying, installing, configuring and training activities associated with the new HW/SW may take as long as the entire project was originally planned.

However, choosing IT products too far in advance of detailed requirements approval might result in extra cost and serious system or function incompatibilities. The need for balance between evolving project requirements and the pressure to make the right IT investments and use them appropriately can be mitigated through methodical IT Solution Architecture practices.

An IT Solution Architecture is essentially an abstraction, or a model, of all the IT-related elements that need to be implemented together to meet business requirements within the IT investment context, including the resources that deliver or use the IT-related elements. Think of a traditional “CONOPS” (Concept of Operations) with an “IT Architecture and Plan” overlay, that meets the Interactive Design objectives. This model takes shape very early in the business solution dialogue, conforming to any Enterprise Architecture models that may be available, and evolves as the solution requirements become more detailed – both influencing the requirements and reflecting them. The model can be represented in many ways, for example through illustrations, process flows, checklists, inventories or documented approaches.

This model is then communicated and used, as the business-to-system requirements are completed, to create the technical requirements, finalize IT asset and service investments and to plan the overall detailed design/build/test/deploy phases.
The Solution Architecture guides more detailed development of the domain-specific technical, system and process architectures - for example the overall security, data, integration and storage architectures. It helps the project maintain traceability from the ultimate technical designs, back not only to the business requirements, but to the guiding IT investment context and Enterprise Architecture. This traceability provides risk mitigation to both the project and its overall investment program, and helps ensure a successful testing phase.

Typically as an unintended benefit, use of a Solution Architecture may also improve the overall collaboration and knowledge-sharing environment of the project.

Therefore, the path from Interactive Design to an implemented, successful IT Solution is considerably more efficient and likely more successful at meeting business requirements if a Solution Architecture is involved, preferably managed by an IT Solution Architect with considerable experience in current system architectures and standards, IT systems engineering and interactive IT solutions.

Find out more about Interactive Design and IT Solution Architectures at Navigation Arts, an Interactive Design and Information Architecture solution consulting firm in McLean, VA.

What's the Scope of Internet Marketing - the Elevator Speech

2010-12-17T06:55:00.000-08:00

A few times recently I've been asked to very plainly explain Internet Marketing/Interactive Marketing, why it's so much better than buying magazine ads, and whether it's really helpful. Here are the basic talking points:

Internet Marketing means promoting and advertising your business through all the Internet channels your customers might use, like your website, other websites, email and social media (i.e. Facebook and Twitter).
Most businesses have an Internet website, really nice ones, but that’s not enough - it should also be highlighted appropriately, for customers to discover…a beautiful storefront in a dark alley attracts no customers.
One way to highlight your website and business is by placing references or advertisements (i.e. “banner ads”, “articles”, “backlinks”, “coupons”, “infomercials”, etc.) on other websites – but only on websites that will most likely send valuable customers to you. There are many choices to consider, both free and paid, and the links or ads need to be well-designed (both the audio/visual and written elements).
Another way is through Internet search engines, like Google and Yahoo. Your customers can use many types of search engines online to find you. These services will highlight your business through their search results, in 2 ways – by paid advertisements (i.e. “Pay Per Click”, or “PPC”), or if your website is very popular and relevant for the search term. To be highlighted successfully, your website, and any online content you create that points back to it, must be “Search Engine Optimized” (SEO).
A third way for customers to find your business on the Internet, is through “earned media”. This means other people on the Internet are voluntarily writing about and sharing great feedback about your business, to their readers, friends and family. This is done on social media like blogs, bookmarking services, Facebook, Twitter, etc. There are many ways to engage and convince others to start online conversations about your products and services – leading to more interested and ultimately paying customers.
Other ways to market your business on the Internet include using games, applications, videos, podcasts…there are many ways to do this, but not all may be appropriate or within your budget.
Be sure to focus marketing first on websites you own - optimizing content on 3rd-party websites and relying on social media for advertising is a temporal proposition - these sites can quickly go away, and your material be lost.
Internet Marketing includes the “conversion” – i.e., your website must be designed to not only attract people, but convince them to act or buy your product.
If done right, they’ll come back for more, and tell others about it.
Most Internet Marketing is much less expensive and reaches more people in your target demographic than traditional media, including TV and magazines. It also lasts longer, and can be accessed not only through personal computers, but through cellphones, GPS devices, electronic billboards, game consoles and digital TVs.
Internet Marketing can also be tracked and analyzed in great detail – unlike traditional advertising (i.e. how many people saw your ad in a magazine, and called you as a result?). This means your return-on-investment (ROI) can be significantly higher. At a lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO). More customers for less money.
In order to achieve best value, however, your Internet Marketing must be tracked, reported and analyzed correctly – since user activity and competing information changes so quickly on the Internet. Your own reputation and brand must also be monitored on a regular basis, to be quickly alerted regarding negative impacts to you, your business or product. Negative information can be spread quickly by employees, competitors, customers or other reviewers.
Your Internet Marketing campaigns should also be integrated with your other marketing and advertising campaigns, in content, execution, budget and reporting. Use phone numbers in online and offline ads that can be tracked via online voice services, for example.
Your competition is already on the Internet – and if they’re using effective Internet Marketing, they are very quickly gaining an advantage that’s not easily overcome.
Your customers are also already on the Internet, especially the younger ones. If they’re not, they soon will be.
To take full advantage of all the Internet Marketing techniques available, in a way that is best suited to your business, professional Internet Marketing services are recommended – especially services from a well-established, technically-current media and marketing firm. This is particularly true for local businesses – a DC local media and marketing firm or larger, national interactive marketing and web design firm will know best the conditions affecting your local Internet Marketing.

So that's the basic elevator pitch script - but there's obviously a lot more, at much greater levels of detail, that will come into play for large, complex online marketing initiatives across thousands of online "channels". Most, however, will want to start with the very basics, which will include SEO of your own website.

The Art and Architecture of the Interactive User Experience in DC

2010-12-10T07:19:00.000-08:00

Very recently I've changed gears a bit to focus much more, on a daily basis, on the "Front End" of the Business Information Management lifecycle - at DC's Navigation Arts, "Architects of the User Experience".

In all digital interactive implementations (i.e. websites and digital applications), a great deal of artistry and intellectual insight is required to fully understand and create a compelling interactive design (both the creative components and information architecture, or navigation) that satisfies both users and investors. As well, a significant amount of communication and translation is needed to successfully implement the design across the required media channels and on top of the supporting IT infrastructure - compliant with business and IT investment constraints.

Many times this translation, between users/designers and the IT "back end" ecosystem (including vendors and 3rd-party service providers) is not much more than a "toss over the wall", subject to significant misunderstandings, inefficiencies, deployment and investment risks.

Where considerable process re-engineering and inclusion of automated services is necessary, a mature engineering lifecycle (we'll assume SOA-influenced) typically takes advantage of process modeling, service definitions and use cases to inform the technical requirements process. The technical requirements will therefore include models of the system, compliant with architecture standards, from perspectives including data and content, technologies and IT management, information-flows and interfaces, organization and roles, and automated processes, workflows and reusable services. These models stand a good chance of adequately reflecting traceable and testable business requirements, while properly orienting and informing the IT designers and developers.

Where the outcome is purely an exercise in web content presentation and interaction strategy, heavily focused on information-sharing vs. data processing, the visual design/information architecture translation to IT requirements tends to end at the WCM model - which very often is the proprietary model of the WCM COTS vendor.

However, if the information needs of the users, intended to be satisfied through the new web design/information architecture, outgrow the native WCM capabilities (in terms of features, scaling or data management) - additional and early "interactive architecture models" are required to inform the supporting IT requirements and design staff, AND translate these additional requirements back to the business investors. These additional models might extend or enhance the information management model fulfilled in part by the WCM tooling, to include additional datastores and sources, media channel interfaces, and perhaps other legacy data management infrastructure. More investment needed, therefore, for IT elements that no one outside of the IT department fully understands.

This is truly, in today's very fragmented, open source-oriented, multi-platform world of the interactive digital user experience, where much more guidance, many more standards and cost-effective modeling tool options are required - to assist in the project-driven translation of user requirements from Art to Architecture.

Raising the Situational Awareness of Your Enterprise IT Program Management Office|PMO

2010-10-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

The concept and use of the Program Management Office (PMO) in Government Information Technology (IT) procurements is both time-tested and well-known. A PMO is typically comprised of experience program and project management personnel, who help the government (i.e. the “client”) monitor and evaluate the performance of significant IT investments – for example building a new computer system, reorganizing and automating business processes, or implementing new IT capabilities within an existing environment. The PMO ensures that program-level risks are mitigated, standards and methods regarding system engineering lifecycle activities are followed, quality management procedures are implemented and all resource utilization is effectively tracked, managed and reported.

The PMO also (and perhaps most importantly) helps make sure that individual procurement and project managers, together contributing to an overall program’s success, are effectively communicating and sharing information and reusable insight. The most capable PMOs provide coordination of planning, communications and reporting between and among the business units and IT staff. This PMO then delivers visibility, by providing some degree of a “common operating picture” (COP) to IT investment and mission stakeholders, based on the “situational awareness” (SA) captured via execution of PMO monitoring and review processes.

Standard PMO practices and organizations, however, are ill-prepared to meet the more real-time demands of “services-oriented” IT investments, in today’s very collaborative, new-media influenced environments. These investment programs require constant, frequent collection and use of information gathered across the entire IT stakeholder enterprise, at multiple levels of visibility, reflecting quickly evolving synergies between the business owners and IT service providers. Reporting earned-value metrics (EVM) including quality, schedule and cost variances across an integrated master schedule (IMS) doesn’t always reflect strategic context or correlate with emerging, changing stakeholder profiles and investments. Tracking and reporting simple delivery of Systems Engineering Lifecycle artifacts misses out on the “value” and “impact” discussions. Effective means of disbursing insight and harvesting reaction doesn’t exist outside of very rigid, procedure-driven communications channels.

While a typical PMO governs the IT investment management processes of many related projects, it falls short of capturing and participating in the development of actionable knowledge around the enterprise that’s not distinctly identified as a project deliverable, but may be enterprise situational awareness that most definitely may result in unplanned risk or success.

Therefore, today’s standard PMO organization, processes and scope of influence requires some evolution, into more of an “Enterprise IT PMO” – to cut across not only the project-oriented IT investment activities, but also to bridge the enterprise services-oriented communication, collaboration and information-sharing activities (that aren’t clearly the singular domain of either business or IT interests). This evolved PMO would foster a more actionable Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Performance Management Plan (PfM), drive increasingly effective Knowledge Management practices (both in and outside of the firewall), respond to and leverage more frequent organizational change, and promulgate rapid enhancements to the IT investment governance processes that are more driven by real-time insight vs. uninformed standard processes. The kinds of new “architect, coaching and consulting” roles, vs. purely administrative, that would be introduced in such an EIT-PMO include:

• Communications and Outreach Manager
• Solution Integration Architect
• SOA Functional Architect
• Enterprise Knowledge and Information Architect
• Enterprise Performance Manager

Communications and Outreach Manager

The Program Communications and Outreach Manager would fulfill the role of the “IT-Savvy Public Relations” staff, albeit leveraging where possible all communications monitoring and distribution channels available. Inside the firewall, available channels would be used for creating, distributing, monitoring and responding to messages and dialogue about the program using email, Intranet sites, blog/microblogs, feedback forms, bulletin boards, wikis, etc. Outside the firewall, this role would be responsible for monitoring dialogue about the program, responding to or channeling questions and feedback, producing and distributing information in a manner that takes advantage of common Internet Marketing techniques (so that the information is found quicker, more often and in the right circumstances). The primary objective of this new role is to enable more timely, collaborative and useful dialogue among a much more connected and complex stakeholder ecology, and to manage and leverage common social media tools or “social business software” as much as possible.

Solution Integration Architect

The Program Solution Integration Architect serves the function of identifying and categorizing prioritized IT resources to meet Business Requirements, aligning IT services and investments to both the Program Business Case and the Enterprise Architecture constraints, and pulling together the organizational roles, structure and expertise necessary to create and implement the Planning or Analysis phases of a program. This role requires an experienced mix of Program Management, Enterprise Architecture and IT Investment Management skills, along with a healthy dose of contextual knowledge and awareness (i.e. understanding of the business and mission). Typically this role is fulfilled by a mosaic of business, IT and program management staff – however, there do exist in most organizations or consulting groups experienced Enterprise Architects or System Architects who not only understand the business problem and context, but have also some background in systems engineering lifecycle-based project management. Such personnel are invaluable additions to the type of PMO being described here, and can truly help bridge the planning and communications gap between the Program Owners/Investors, the Business Users and the Enterprise IT Department.

SOA Functional Architect

Many large IT initiatives these days tend to reflect the influence of Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods, if not actually practice them. Very often on an SOA-guided IT Program, the SOA or Functional Architect is a member of the “Technical Team”, though with considerable influence or membership among the “Business Team” groups. That’s the role, to help guide the expression of business and functional requirements in terms of reusable processes and accompanying standardized, automated IT components and services, aligned with the Enterprise Architecture. There’s very often a time-sucking disconnect between the functional and technical architecture build, and the program management resourcing necessary to approve, apply resources, monitor and communicate theses activities with the rest of the Program stakeholders. Installing an SOA-experienced Functional Architect on the PMO should significantly decrease the amount of time spent convincing program owners, investors and stakeholders as to the effectiveness and appropriateness of the developing solution design, whether from a resource management or enterprise architecture compliance perspective.

Enterprise Knowledge and Information Architect

An often overlooked and under-resourced requirement of large PMOs is the need for integrated knowledge and information management. A large PMO governing investment across a collection of very complex, inter-related Enterprise IT domains will itself both collect and generate huge volume of information. Not all the information will be documented and preserved effectively; much will be trapped within the brains and personal processes of individual managers and SMEs. The Communications and Outreach role described above will do a lot to unlock, expose and collect some of this, but an information and knowledge management strategy would help actually harness it to achieve significant gains in productivity, risk mitigation, investment control and overall delivery of mission or business value. The most valuable information probably revolves around the more tacit reasons, factors and sources of program successes and failure, vs. the explicit policies, standards, reports, issue logs and EVM metrics. The PMO is itself a major consumer and provider of information, and therefore deserves a dedicated strategy for managing its information and associated data management tools and repositories – rather than relying perhaps on underutilized, inefficient or otherwise unhelpful existing information management tools and processes.

Enterprise Performance Manager

Standard PMO processes and roles include many who engage in tracking metrics, creating reports, establishing and mapping Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and aligning project performance measures and results to IT acquisition and investment management goals. This last role, mapping project results to enterprise objectives, is a role that requires quite a bit of creativity, enterprise insight and near real-time situational awareness of enterprise IT investments, project status and personnel resources. As service-enabled (i.e. SOA) capabilities are rapidly conceived and deployed around the enterprise, the return-on-investment (ROI) numbers and total costs of ownership (TCO) calculations that have been projected for your program, and included in the annual budgeting cycle, can quickly and significantly change. As projects - upon which your own program depends - rapidly evolve and deliver anticipated (or unanticipated) results, many dependencies or relationships that constrain your project may quickly change.

As significant knowledge is obtained or developed within communities or expertise or key personnel around or outside the organization – that clearly change some of your project’s assumptions, performance targets or resource availability – this must quickly be used to re-factor your own project’s performance goals, and must be quickly communicated and shared with your project’s stakeholders and investors. This kind of knowledge and insight, reflecting tacit performance trends and outcomes around the enterprise, might be monitored and tracked in terms that those evangelizing Social Media programs understand – tracking relationships, resonance of opinion, reach and influence of negative sentiment, and other factors that implicitly highlight probable issues ors risks for your program. In short, program performance management must have an enterprise perspective with which to constantly and quickly measure the impact of change.

Most PMOs moving forward in this era of information-sharing, social media and fine-grained, agile IT Investment needs will require consideration of the roles outlined in this Enterprise IT PMO illustration, if not others. Smaller PMO’s would be wise to seek these roles as shared capabilities and inherent skills among experienced managers; larger PMO’s might directly staff to these positions (or otherwise assign these roles to existing, dedicated resources). Blackstone Technology Group’s Federal Government Practice, in Washington DC, is a great example of a Federal Government IT Management and Consulting firm that is actively applying these strategies and roles in its execution of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) PMO contracts (with Enterprise IT scope). Contact Blackstone for more information, and also find more information about their participation in the upcoming DHS Eagle II Acquisition Program.

DC Jobs: Seeking Sr. Program Advisor-Manager (SETA), Sr. Java/SOA Architect, Development Mgr.

2010-08-04T07:50:00.001-07:00

Seeking Full-Time Roles for US Federal Government positions right now, with a very healthy and well-respected IT Consulting firm in DC - contact me at tedmclaughlan AT gmail DOT com. :

Sr. JAVA/SOA Architect - 7 years experience
(contact me for more details; general background consistent with SETA role below)

Development Manager
(contact me for more details; general background consistent with SETA role below)

Sr. Technical Advisor (SETA) - 7 years experience

This is a very unique, interesting, fulfilling and critical role - send me questions, your resume and I can help you understand more...

- Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in an engineering or science discipline with a minimum of 10 years experience in government consulting.

- Active DoD Secret Clearance Required.

- Must successfully complete a stringent Background Investigation and obtain the required Government Security (Active DHS clearance is a plus - U.S. Citizenship is a requirement).

- Previous experience in a Systems Engineering Technical Advisory (SETA) role, working within an large, established Program Office environment, to include background with systems analysis and design of information systems programs, preferably in a consulting firm environment. Government client experience is highly desired.

- Experience w/ and desire to work in a PMO environment.

- Well versed in technical concepts (enterprise architecture integration, data centers activities/virtualization, data management, application life cycle management, web portals) and demonstrates strong tactical delivery and implementation management experience.

- Must have all or some combination of the following skills:

o IT experience in the applicable industry

o Quality program experience, such as ISO-9000, CMMI or Six Sigma implementation and assessments

o Specific project management training experience

o Familiar with implementing information sharing and collaboration portals

o Familiar with portal and content management products

- Demonstrates outstanding leadership skills and success building team relationships and partnerships across organizational lines

- Experienced managing client requirements and related team members

- Demonstrates excellent analytical skills and business presentation skills

- Demonstrates strong client interfacing skills: a positive attitude, high energy, very articulate communication, excellent interpersonal skills, out-going, and highly motivated

- Excellent oral and written communication skills (ability to create and maintain technical documentation leveraging SMEs for content)

- Experience with MS Project

- You demonstrate the ability to interact comfortably with Senior Leadership and/or Government Executives and staff on a day-to-day basis.

- You are a self-starter who can provide client solutions with minimal instructions and can run independently on projects.

- You thrive in a dynamic work environment, exhibiting ability to be flexible and a strong team-player.

Are Portals Headed for a CRISIS? Channel Rendered Identity Served Information Sharing

2010-07-26T08:07:00.000-07:00

Having managed delivery of eGovernment services over the Internet for the past 15 years, I’ve lived through the rise of the “Intentions-Based Portal” in programs including IRS.gov, NYC.gov, USAF.gov, USPS.gov, Maryland.gov, Delaware.gov and USDA.gov. The multi-subject, user customized characteristics of these Internet Portals reflected commercial success in community portals like Yahoo, Compuserve and AOL, but were fundamentally budgeted to provide strategic cost-savings via improved government efficiency – by delivering government information and highly-transactional services to constituents.

While Yahoo was all about creating a Portal for users’ entertainment, directory assistance, shopping, and social networking, serving both subscribers and advertisers, NYC.gov and other eGovernment Portals were all about more rapid, effective and comprehensive delivery of citizen services – serving both the public and agency employees. Different missions, but similar and overlapping audiences focused on a single channel, the world wide web (WWW). The focus on the audience and user-customized views, plus efficiencies gained from centralized content publishing and single-sign on, drove a rapid proliferation of Portal and accompanying Content Management System (CMS) software from now-defunct vendors including Plumtree, Eprise and BroadVision.

Portals are still here, and in widespread use – as are Portal software products, though now mostly the domain of IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle. You enter the portal through your computer, choose the information or transaction you need, and then use the results in your businesses or other activities. It stays, you come and go. The portal may reproduce or extend application features and functions from other software, to this central “marketplace”, but it’s usually a shallow implementation that’s not very contextually and semantically-aware. It really doesn’t know “the Situation” ©Jersey Shore.

For example, a typical eCommerce site will, after you log into the website with your browser, present shopping options, specials, cross- and up-sell suggestions based on your profile and transaction patterns – but it really doesn’t know much about your current shopping situation, nor can you really tell it to behave as if so.

“I’m driving in the car, have a chat going with my sister, whose birthday is tomorrow, and I’m approaching a Mall – would really like to know of any cool electronic or entertainment specials that might interest her, and get suggestions from my friends and family (but influenced by industry reviews and trends). And I want an SMS suggestion right now, since anything else is hard to deal with while I’m looking for parking. If I indicate so, go ahead and ship it overnight, and I’ll pay later and frankly avoid the store altogether in favor of another geo-sensitive, socially-aware SMS suggestion (i.e. my friend’s cookout) – that’s just the way I roll.”

Enter the need for, and developing implementation of, the “channel-rendered identity served information sharing” service. Sitting there in my car, a service like this can not only record explicit commands and analyze recorded profile indicators, but infer contextual variables (like things I might want or need, location-based factors, news and knowledge-driven information) based on my channel and identity. My channel is a certain mobile platform and preferred communication style, in motion through a certain time and place, and in proximity to other available channels. My identity includes my own profile and status along many social, personal and business vectors, along with the intersection of those of my contacts in different groups, with different relationship levels. In this particular situation, I need information to be shared among several services and people towards the end of supporting my core mission, and perhaps asynchronous objectives that may be impacted. Even if my battery dies.

The vision rendered here isn’t supported by typical Portal and Content Management software, even with a largesse of integrated social media collaboration tools, semantic search and suggestion functions, and curated, real-time content feeds. This is primarily because what I need isn’t wholly-contained in one Software implementation (and license/payment agreement), but is dynamically-provisioned in a situational-aware manner by many providers, drawing on many data sources, and capable of real-time adjustments in the quality, quantity and personality of information supplied. I’m driving the car, therefore, can’t I drive my own information-sharing service? Is not my personal web presence more important than yours? Why do I need a home page?

How then, is this accomplished…

Many elements are required to pull this off, and many constraints exist – though far fewer than last year, and exponentially far fewer than in the previous. Dynamic socialization, i.e. starting a multimedia conversation across user-preferred channels in real time in response to an event – this is possible. Geo-spatially aware services that provide both proximity and contextually-significant perspective – keying off your cellphone and rendering via the heads-up display in your car – this is possible. Search engine execution and results curation of your 6-word request for information – infused with friends’ suggestions, aligned with your folksonomy, filtered for noise, and inclusive of commercial or community advertisements metered to your personal tolerance – this is possible. Offering all these services in a single software or application solution with an enterprise-driven governance, security and knowledge management model – this is not possible, and certainly not with a typical Portal product.

It is possible with smart, dynamic implementation of information-sharing services that are driven, in real time, by situational awareness of a person’s identity and access to information-delivery channels. So a single software product or set of services is unlikely to do the trick – a user-controlled implementation of a flexible services framework with open standards, pre-negotiated data governance, and implemented as a contributing node of a broader Internet social ecology will happen, and soon. Products like Jive (social business software), Jackbe (data mashup platform), 4Square (geo-aware social application) are part of the plumbing.

Perhaps a Portal (but not your father’s Portal) is necessary to turn them all on and configure to one’s benefit? Is this actually Google?

TIBCO jobs and careers - DC, Federal Government

2010-07-16T05:30:00.000-07:00

Just a quick comment noting the increasing availability and demand for TIBCO engineers, developers, architects and other TIBCO job offerings, as TIBCO establishes its strong presence across the Federal Government and Homeland Security IT marketing with its SOA/ESB and BPM offerings, including ActiveMatrix, Silver Spotfire Cloud Business Intelligence and Analytics with Infrastructure Demand Prediction, and all other products and related systems development tools and programming languages. Average salaries range from $80K - $150K for senior architects; it's an employee demand market, so very competitive offerings are available. The TIBCO job market appears to have recovered from its downslide in 2008, and is headed sharply upwards since mid-2009 through now in 2010. Check TIBCO-jobs.com for more info...Specific TIBCO skills being sought at median salaries of $100K and rising include:

Software Design/Development, TIBCO Architect, C, HTML, SQL, Java Script, TIBCO BusinessWorks 2.x/5.x, TIBCO Collaborator/Formflow, TIBCO Adapter SDK, TIBCO Rendezvous, TIBCO Adapter for Active Database, TIBCO Adapter for SAP, and many others...

Is My Employer Practicing Web 2.0 or Government 2.0? How Can I Help?

2010-04-22T04:02:00.000-07:00

As an employee, it can be really invigorating to discover that your employer is a trend-setting (or following) participant in Web 2.0 practices. Your employer may actually market this, its "Web 2.0 expertise". This seems to suggest your employer is current, relevant, amenable to open standards generated by a global community of open source evangelists, engaged in online social discussion, promoting its brand (and your good work) around the Internet and basically joining the fun. But is it really?

The "2.0" in phrases preceded by labels including "Web", "Enterprise", "Government" basically indicates the use of web-enabled technologies that foster online community dialogue (vs. a one-way information "push"), the use and support of network-discoverable data sharing tools created with entirely open standards, and the actual participation in online dialogue and information-sharing. In other words:

1) Find and install a tool that allows feedback (or use a 3rd-party service)
2) Enable the tool and its users to both publish and consume open standards-formatted data easily (in the environment it operates), and
3) Actually use it as intended, and let it be used with minimal restraint.

(Point number 3 above is for all those companies who've signed up for Twitter or Facebook, but don't use it in dialogue, or only push press releases).

If your company has an Intranet, or internal portal with all the bells and whistles (supporting employee postings, feedback, chat, etc.), this is a good thing. It's definitely an "Enterprise 2.0" approach - but probably is pretty constrained in terms of the three factors listed above. If the constraints are flexible and community-driven, and the "walled-garden" nature of this "behind the firewall" environment can actually leverage Internet-accessible or sourced data and tools...then your employer really is practicing Enterprise 2.0. But not necessarily Web 2.0.

Admittance to the Web 2.0 club really means that your employee's communications, data manipulation, information discovery, feedback, and knowledge contribution actually happen on the Internet - using freely available tools and services. This activity might be moderated or bounded by some kind of group membership - but it's definitely outside the firewall and on the Web. Some Enterprise 2.0 implementations can and do bridge the corporate firewall (with some content governance controls for security purposes) and the Internet - this "proxied Web 2.0" is a reasonable "on-ramp" to full Web 2.0 participation. By the way, your employees are probably practicing Web 2.0 without the proxy, on their own at home with their other communities.

Government 2.0 is basically Enterprise and/or Web 2.0 for civic purposes...and since "civic" these days includes the drive for a more open, transparent government (in terms of Internet-accessible data) - it's really Web 2.0 enabling better Government. Government entities and corporations with highly informed and advanced Enterprise 2.0 programs or tools supporting citizen-centric missions can make some claim to being part of the "Government 2.0" movement - but the leaders here fully adopt open, Internet Web 2.0 precepts.

While your employer may not actually participate itself (with its own intellectual assets) in Web 2.0, it may deliver products and services (like social extranets or data mashup web applications) that enable clients or others to do so (including for employees during their "off hours", or otherwise "volunteer time"). It may create these purely as a contribution to the global community, in a way that is entirely disassociated from the corporate knowledge systems, intellectual property or branding. Frequently this kind of benefit originates from employees acting on their own, outside corporate governance (though with implicit linkage to their employer and acknowledgment of related policy and social behavior/security constraints). Examples of this include GovLoop and GovTwit - two entirely Web 2.0 capabilities supporting the Government mission. If your employer is an explicit or implicit provider of support for such initiatives - it's practicing Web 2.0.

So, is your employer practicing Web 2.0? Probably, to some degree, especially if you're doing so yourself. If you're not, you can certainly help...it starts with discovery and feedback. Find out what others are discussing, and what tools and methods they're using to discuss it online. Participate, give back, make it better - but learn and stay within commonly-understood public discourse guidelines and corporate Internet security policies (does your employee have some?). Suggest use of helpful Web 2.0 tools on the Internet, to your community members and to your employer. Create some of your own.

If you're an employer, here's a posting about "Supporting Your Employer With Social Media", that can be used to help inform and guide your employees.

Local Online Social Behavior and Internet New Media

2010-03-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

This group of Loudoun Blogs represents a wonderful and unique cross-section of the life and business of Loudoun County, VA, and is a very straightforward means for residents and business owners to participate in local community dialogue through “social media”. Like other communities, there are also lots of other Loudoun-centric online forums out there – on individual blogs, bulletin boards, on Facebook and LinkedIn, in Twitter streams and Wikis; thousands of Loudouners discussing topics from pizza to economic development. It’s growing consensus that identifying yourself (vs. anonymity) is much more helpful in achieving respect and social prominence on the web – but revealing your “personally identifiable information” (PII) is a two-edged sword.

Hopefully, most of us using social media (or any other communication method on the Internet) understand how and why PII should be protected. The spammers, criminal elements and virus distributors don’t need much of it to make your life miserable. Most mainstream social media tools do make it very easy to engage in online discussions, protect your sensitive information (like home address and phone), yet reveal enough about yourself to legitimize yourself as a trustworthy, contributing social networker.

A fast-growing issue, however, is that the PII under your control isn’t the only way to identify you. Your online activities and behavior may be sufficient to identify you, regardless of whether your name or other identifying information is actually available. We’ve all probably seen some of the ugly underbelly of social media, i.e. questionable behavior or plain nastiness thrown around by those foolish enough to be public about it (note to Loudoun County Schools – you really need an updated Staff and Students Social Media Policy). However, according to this New York Times article (thanks Anakam 2FA for passing this along), along with all kinds of programs underway by our Federal Government for Homeland Security purposes, it’s increasingly obvious that your online behavior leaves a durable, easy-to-identify trail behind.

So the message to the Loudoun business community in particular is, your choices of social media tools, forums, topics and profiles to leverage is only the setup – the online discussion and relationship-building behavior that follows is the slam-dunk.

Northern Virginia JEE/Oracle Agile/Scrum Master and JDevelopers wanted

2010-03-24T05:01:00.000-07:00

Looking for a Northern Virginia Agile/Scrum Master and Jdevelopers for 2-year local gig...ask at http://www.bstonetech.com/ContactCRM.asp

For a very high-profile Education-related effort, upgrade of a significant JEE/Oracle-based data collection/ingest/analysis/OLAP/reporting effort.

Federal Open Government Directive, Social Media, SEO and Information Sharing

2010-03-09T06:56:00.000-08:00

Last week’s “Meeting the Open Government Directive” (OGD) conference hosted by GovDelivery (new owners of the popular GovLoop.com public/private social media forum) showcased a number of very important, relevant initiatives and ideas to help Federal Agencies comply with this important White House mandate. The directive comes from a memorandum signed by President Obama on his very first day in office, to all federal agencies directing them to break down barriers to transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and the people it is to serve. Most agencies have already started their compliance initiatives, creating “Open Government” pages (for example at DHS) to highlight shared data sources and programs, and all agencies are required to present their holistic strategies (i.e. their “Open Government Plan”) by April 7th of this year.

Ideas from the public regarding how agencies should approach their Open Government Plans are currently being accepted through March 19th, 2010, at specific agency pages under Ideascale.com – this “citizen engagement tool” and crowdsourcing online social media service was wisely implemented as a single program investment and IT infrastructure under GSA, shared across all agencies. This is a great opportunity to create and submit opinions and ideas regarding government information-sharing transparency – this kind of crowdsourcing has already been proving successful to the Data.gov initiative, with the open dialogue hosted at datagov.ideascale.com.

With the backdrop of the GovDelivery conference in mind (find discussion on Twitter via #govdogd), here are a few Open Government ideas and comments from a few perspectives, including those of Blackstone Technology Group’s New Media Practice.

Localization
While the OGD initiative is entirely appropriate and useful at the Federal level, so too are (and would be) similar efforts and the State and County levels. There do exist many more localized public/private initiatives where government is reaching out to harness the wisdom and unique talents of its constituents, for the purpose of rapid feedback and identification of critical applied knowledge. These initiatives are, however, typically very grassroots-driven or otherwise non-uniform in their implementation; the Federal Government might find an advantage (perhaps through individual agencies, aligned with particular government service lines of business) in extending the Open Government offerings for local use. An example might be the rapidly-developing Loudoun County, VA Economic Development Commission’s New Media initiative, where local business and government leaders are working together to find ways to leverage new and social media to attract and retain business investment in the County. Where this initiative does have presence on most major social networks (for example on LinkedIn and GovLoop), perhaps the Department of Commerce’s Open Government dialogue could be segmented (or enhanced via “tagging”) for those focused on particular localities or geographic regions. Models and methods might then develop that are more quickly consumed and leveraged by others in the same situation.

Social Media and Search Engine Optimization (SMO/SEO)
The GovDelivery folks delivered an extensive set of recommendations and ideas for enhancing and delivering the OGD, from emphasizing use of existing/current tools (vs. building new ones) to making sure successes are tracked openly, effectively and collaboratively. Also covered was the fact that integration and cross-promotion of socialization channels was an important facet of building and sustaining audience participation. One very important “channel” not quite covered, was Search Engines. The Internet Marketing/SEO industry provides a broad array of tools, techniques and methods to help businesses and organizations promote themselves and be found more easily via search engines (like Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube/Search, Twitter/Search); those agencies seeking to promote their offerings and information transparency would do well to adopt some of these SEO techniques. Optimizing content (text or multimedia) when and as it’s distributed through content channels or syndicators is absolutely imperative, to be sure it’s easily found when people are searching for it in their own terms and their own language. DC-are subject matter experts like KME Internet Marketing find that “citizens most typically will use search engines like Google or within their social community platforms to quickly find data – but they’ll use words and phrases that are typically informally descriptive, vs. prescribed labels or acronyms. Government content needs to be optimized for search engines wherever it lives or is consumed”.

Information Sharing and Management
Several of the great presenters at the GovDelivery conference played on the core themes for success in delivering results – i.e. begin with the “Problem”, develop the “Community”, and apply the “Tools”. The point in this method is not to start with all those nifty Web 2.0/Social Media/New Media tools, but to approach Government Transparency initiatives first from the business or mission perspective. This is a common and well-recognized refrain to those of us practicing Enterprise Architecture and IT Investment and Governance Management within Government, i.e. making sure that Information Technology serves the investor requirements, within appropriate constraints and standards, and with full communication and approval of the user community.

The facet missing or under-represented from this 3-step plan is the management and packaging of the information that’s required, in a manner that enables SEO objectives like those expressed above, and that takes advantage of all the great Federal Information-Sharing Environment initiatives (including NIEM.gov) that are gradually finding use in Social Media context. We’re not yet to the point that reliable and easy-to-use automated content management is readily available for most social media exchanges. We do, however, have access to many examples of traditional portal/collaboration/situational awareness programs enhancing their offerings to include social media or “Enterprise 2.0” features - all while maintaining traceability to data standards, information lexicons and other information sharing models that promote reusability and ultimately citizen value. An example of this is the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN), enhancing its “socialization” capabilities while maintaining compliance with NIEM standards.

In summary, the Open Government Directive is off to a great start, with likely thousands of great ideas to be absorbed from interested constituents and industry experts – through modern social media channels and in a manner that truly contributes to the greater good.

DC and Northern Virginia IT Investors and Entrepreneurs - Southeast Venture Conference Feb. 24-25

2010-02-17T13:36:00.000-08:00

Looking for 2010's most promising high-tech (social media included!) ideas and venture capital investing opportunities? In this Southeast US, Washington DC and Northern Virginia region? 2010 is shaping up to be a huge year for investing potential, especially in new media technologies, and the Northern Virginia/Washington DC area is a hotspot for this facet of regional economic development...

The upcoming 2010 Southeast Venture Conference will host some of the most dynamic high-growth companies in the Southeast US, Feb 24-25, 2010 at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, Northern Virginia.

The 2010 (4th annual) Southeast Venture Conference SEVC will feature 60 high growth companies presenting their new ideas and opportunities for investment, representing the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic US regions. The expected audience of 700+ VCs, PE Investors, Ibankers, high growth executives and entrepreneurs will make for unparalleled networking among the region’s top technology and investment leaders. Scheduled speakers include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Google’s "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, and National Venture Capital Association president Mark Heesen. (Last we heard Vint Cerf speak - he was at the NIEM conference planning to extend "cloud computing" into space, and back....)

The Southeast Venture Conference highlights both early stage and later stage investment opportunities from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington DC. The sold-out 2007, 2008 and 2009 SEVC’s held in Research Triangle Park, NC, Tysons Corner, VA and Atlanta, Georgia respectively featured over $80 billion in private equity investment capital represented in attendance.

Who usually attends the SEVC? According to their website, close to 1000 of the region’s leading Entrepreneurs and High Growth Company Executives (from Startups to Pre-IPO), National Venture Capitalists and Private Equity Professionals, M&A facilitators and other leading professionals serving the high growth technology community.

Early online registration is available through Feb. 24rd.

Employees - 10 Tips for Promoting your Employer with Personal Social Media

2010-01-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

I’ve been asked from time to time by businesses about how to educate employees on using Social Media – from two perspectives. One perspective is simply as part of a broader Internet use policy, to help employees stay safe and protect information assets. Another perspective is to encourage employees to support their business in their daily online activities, should they choose to do so. This is essentially giving employees as “social media enthusiasts” the tools and guidance they should get, to help them positively contribute to the overall online marketing efforts of their employer.

Following is some template guidance that can be used and shared with employees. Let us know how this can be improved or updated. Additional consulting regarding planning and implementing social media programs for businesses and organizations is available via KME Internet Marketing in DC.

Use of Personal Social Media to Support ABC (Employer)

This non-legal memo contains straightforward, general advice regarding things to consider when using Internet Social Media to promote your employer. While ABC (Employer) may or may not have an “official” Personal Social Media or Internet Use Policy at this time – these additional guidelines should be very helpful in maintenance and growth of your relationship with ABC, where use of Social Media to promote ABC is concerned.

Note this guidance can and should also be used to promote the area and industry your employer serves – i.e., from an Economic Development or "Place Marketing" perspective. By promoting your neighborhood, county or city for example as a great place to visit or live, this helps promote the general business climate and possibly attract new customers and employees for your company. Here’s an example of how some businesses and employees are actively promoting Loudoun County VA online.

The Internet is a great tool and venue to use for promotions and advertising, whether for personal reasons (i.e. promoting yourself, your cause or interests), or for promoting businesses, products and events, whether commercial or nonprofit. ABC does draw a clear line between actively engaging particular employees in their online marketing and communications strategy, and simply providing guidelines for personal Internet activity (i.e. not related to, or requested by the employer).

ABC is currently engaged in many different kinds of online (and offline) advertising and marketing efforts for its business and brand, such as posting links about upcoming specials and events on its website, in various newspaper and social media websites, and on local search engines (like Google). ABC is directly paying service providers and specific employees to do this - this document provides guidelines for all other employees, partners or contractors.

Employees of ABC, like employees of just about any other kind of business, aren’t required or expected to market, advertise or otherwise promote their employer in any way, unless it’s specifically a part of your job description or contract. If marketing isn’t part of your job, it’s usually better to check first with your supervisor or employer if you’d like to promote your company or services on your own – this will help avoid any risks or issues based on mis-communication. There may be some ways you can help promote the business and your role in it, that are aligned with the company’s business strategy, operations, legal and personal privacy protection responsibilities. There may also be some specific training available.

It is typically helpful in one’s personal, professional development to support your employer’s public presence, whether directly or indirectly. Using a restaurant as an example, if you really like the restaurant menu or a particular entertainer, starting some “buzz” and telling your friends and family about it is a good thing. Proudly wearing an ABC-supplied shirt or hat with the ABC logo in public can draw positive, helpful attention to ABC. The more positive conversations or impressions you generate, the more ABC and its employees benefit over the short and long run. Likewise, negative or conflicting impressions about ABC can quickly spread, whether intentionally or not…your family of employees should always be supported with the respect and professionalism they deserve.

Social media on the Internet is a much-discussed venue for sharing information and engaging others. Social media is generally easy and quick to use, can be really helpful in spreading the word, and enables interesting ways to see and share videos, music and pictures. Social media includes websites you may already use, like MySpace.com, Twitter.com and Facebook.com – along with many other kinds of Weblogs (Blogs), “Chat” applications and other bookmarking or review-oriented sites. While social media can be really helpful and entertaining, using it for any reason is not without certain elements of risk…just like any other use of the Internet.

Risks include others finding out your personal information, damaging your computer, possibly stealing information or money from you, or otherwise intruding on your personal, family or professional privacy. Risks also include damage to reputation – whether that of your own, someone else’s or even that of a business. Damage to reputation takes many forms, and on the Internet, it can be very hard to recover from. Risky online behavior and negative online postings (about anything or anyone) can also be damaging to your career and employment status – so be careful and safe on the Internet, especially using Social media. An example set of good guidelines for “engaging in public discourse” is available at http://www.sun.com/communities/guidelines.jsp . Take a look, and let us know if you’ve got any questions, or would like more information.

IF you do use the Internet and Social Media regularly, and IF you decide to share or point out positive information online about your employer (or anything related to your job or industry), there are some helpful, additional guidelines and methods to take note of here. This advice can only help your contribution be as positive and effective as possible (and help avoid some of the risks mentioned previously). Again, ask others who know for more advice, or let us know if you need help with questions or issues.

Bookmarks – if you see news, an article or website on the Internet about ABC, and you like it, feel free to share the link with others – using bookmarking tools like Digg.com or Mixx.com.
Sharing – if you find an article, advertisement, picture or other information about ABC, its events or entertainers – feel free to share it with others through your Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Flickr account. This can be especially helpful for an upcoming event or product announcement. Do be extra careful about infringing on copyrights, brand trademarks or personal privacy of others – for example, posting videos identifying other people online without their permission.
Following, Friending, Fans – for those of you who regularly use Twitter or Facebook, you know that sometimes other people or groups may start social, online conversations about topics you’re also interested in; by joining the group, or following such a person, that helps build both your and their credibility and influence regarding the topic. If the topic relates to your employer or industry, all the better! Also check ABC’s site for “RSS” feeds – subscribing to these with an RSS reader is a quick and easy way to keep up with news and events.
Reviews – there exist many forums and online websites like Yelp.com or more industry-specific sites that encourage fans of local businesses to record their reviews; if you like a business, it’s always helpful to let others know about it. Be truthful, and don't post unwarranted negative reviews about the competition!
Traveling around town – there are some applications that allow you to notify others of your location-based interests; for example Brightkite or FourSquare on your GPS-enabled mobile phone – these location-based social networking tools are great to let others know where and when you’ll be visiting ABC!
Your own site, blog or emails – it’s always nice for a business or organization to get positively mentioned or linked to, from somebody else’s website – especially with helpful, professional comments and descriptions. Let ABC know about your site, and your support – ABC may find it helpful to promote you!
ABC email list – ABC has its own website, and may (or does) also have additional website and group presence on social media sites – if you want to stay up-to-date with ABC services and events, register for available email list notifications, and let others know they can too (emails can be forwarded).
Your social or professional profile – many professionals provide personal details such as their employers, the type of work they do, and certifications on networking sites like LinkedIn.com or Facebook.com; this is generally a helpful thing for professional growth and networking, but you’ll want to be sure to not reveal any particularly sensitive details about your work, employer or family. Stick with the basics, like “I work at ABC in Northern Virginia” – but avoid giving out non-public information (like your work hours, employer team profile, home address, family names or home telephone number).
Keywords – any information you post on the Internet is more helpful to your employer, if it includes words and phrases that are associated with your employer’s business or industry. For ABC, great phrases to use include things like “[insert key phrases here]”. If these words are actually used as a website link (i.e. one clicks on the phrase and is taken to www.[ABC].com, for example), even better.
A note on Web Links – some of the very most helpful things to a business on the Internet, are “hyperlinks” (i.e. web links) pointing back to the business website. The more, the better, especially if the links are from very popular, well-read websites. Therefore, anytime you post information about your employer or industry on the web, be sure to use a good link – it’s helpful both to the business, and to readers, and search engines really like to see these. If you know that someone else will be posting information you provided (like a reporter or a newsletter editor, online or printed), ask them to include a hyperlink.

Thanks for reading through this material about your Employer and Internet Social Media. There are many other resources available to you; search around the Internet, ask someone who knows, or check back with us.

Executing Real Time Enterprise Governance Strategies with Enterprise BPM 3.0

2010-01-22T14:06:00.000-08:00

It remains true that the most valuable aspect of the Business Process Management (BPM) discipline is its ability to help an organization govern rather than just manage, but this ability requires a comprehensive view of the technologies and methods that truly make up enterprise class BPM. It also requires real time, collaborative information sharing from both the governance and participant perspectives. Executing to such a view can help deliver IT Governance Process Integration benefits, in real time.

Read more here about this Blackstone Technology Group Enterprise BPM Consulting Services Point of View - by Clay Almy, Directory of Enterprise Integration, Blackstone Technology Group.

Enterprise Architecture Key to Avoiding Cloud Computing Cloud Sprawl – AFCEA Federal Cloud Computing Environment Forum

2009-12-17T13:25:00.001-08:00

Attendance at today's Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) Bethesda Chapter Breakfast Series entitled "Federal Cloud Computing Environments – Modernizing IT Systems" was very heavy, as viewed from the Blackstone Technology Group sponsored table. The panel discussion and DC Federal IT community networking conversation revolved around the push to promote and adopt cloud computing as part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems, and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for Federal IT in the process.

The event panelists held an informative and rigorous discussion about how cloud computing is enabling IT professionals (government and industry) to rethink the packaging, delivery and operation of government services, and is changing the landscape of government IT infrastructure management and streamlining system, network and storage management. Panelists included Casey Coleman (Moderator - Chief Information Officer, General Services Administration), Chris Kemp (CIO, NASA Ames Research Center), Alfred Rivera (Director - Computing Services Directorate, Defense Information Systems Agency or DISA), Keith Trippie (Executive Director - Enterprise System Development Office (ESDO), Office of the CIO, Department of Homeland Security), and Peter Tseronis (Associate CIO, Department of Energy).

Quite a bit of conversation centered on the precept that Enterprise Architecture is absolutely critical for Cloud Computing success. EA helps translate OMB’s IT Investment guidance and Component mission business models into an operational language that more effectively guides IT retooling to support cloud computing concepts such as self-provisioning, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and shared SOA services. Whether a Cloud Computing program and infrastructure is implemented to provision infrastructure for laboratory scientists (e.g. NASA’s Nebula Program), or for enabling rapid self-provisioning of elastic, scalable, and virtual services to front-line Warfighters (e.g. DISA’s Rapid Access Computing Environment, or “RACE” Program); the business and socialization challenges are similar.

According to the panelists, many Federal programs aren’t yet able to operationalize their Enterprise Architecture, by executing coordinated, efficient IT procurements informed by an enterprise-wide, standards-based, comprehensive and easily understood business case. “This is Enterprise Architecture’s time”…and EA is key to avoiding cloud proliferation, sprawl or otherwise redundant IT governance and investments (and finding ways to leverage existing, underutilized infrastructure investments as GFE in new cloud-computing acquisition strategies).

While most discussion centered on the “brutal standardization” required for cloud-based IT Infrastructure Management and Services, additional conversation developed concerning more customer-centric and application-oriented objectives, i.e. "Software as a Service" or SaaS. In particular, the DHS ESDO is embarking on a major initiative to fulfill DHS objectives for delivering customer-centric applications and information services on demand, governed by the Department's rapidly evolving Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Enterprise Architecture and Homeland Security Information-Sharing initiatives (Federal EA SOA ESB governance initiatives that Blackstone Technology Group is helping to drive across the Department.)

Conversation also addressed issues relating to Security Certification & Accreditation (C&A) challenges – particularly the rapidly-growing tension between “consumerism of IT” (i.e. user expectations that government services offer commercial features and public data) and information or application sensitivity. Currently mandated security processes and controls aren’t necessarily compatible with the “elastic” properties of cloud implementation, i.e. the on-demand utilization or release of IT resources through dynamic infrastructure configuration. Also, perceived risks far more often stand in the way of cloud-computing security policies, vs. actual risks – this therefore requires much more effort on the part of “translators” bridging the gap between business and technology, i.e. the Enterprise Architects.

DC and Northern Virginia Internet Marketing and New Media Workshop Announced by KME

2009-12-15T13:34:00.000-08:00

Important DC and Northern Virginia Regional Business and Marketing Networking Announcement:
by KME Internet Marketing

Learn Integrated Online Marketing/Advertising, Branding, Web Design, SEO, Social Media, Analytics and Internet Video - in Northern Virginia, DC metro area.

As 2009 draws to a close, it’s become very apparent that 2010 will continue to be an extremely challenging year for businesses seeking new customers, and new ways to market and advertise their brand and services. As well, the ability of Northern Virginia and DC-area professionals to effectively learn and leverage new Online Marketing and Internet New Media/Web 2.0 skills is hampered by the current lack of expert yet cost-effective, local and hands-on Internet Marketing/SEO training. Add to this the dizzying proliferation of Social Media publishing and analytic tools, the rapid change in the search engine technologies and video media industries, and the quickly-growing competition for eyeballs and click-throughs from the web – it’s about time for some local solutions.

Local Internet Marketing and Media Workshops

KME Internet Marketing (KME) in the DC metro area is holding the first of an upcoming series of professional Internet Marketing and Media Workshops on January 29th, 2010 – from 9AM to 2PM, at Trivision Studios in Chantilly, VA.

KME Internet Marketing is the region’s industry leader in providing cost-effective yet engineering-grade solutions for online marketing, social media optimization and analytics-driven Internet marketing management. Trivision Studios is a full service global creative design, branding and media production group, operating a 12,000 square foot, state-of-the-art studio facility complete with staging, lights, cameras, two-story loading dock, meeting space, media room, and omnimedia edit suites.

Our special guest Workshop lead is Melanie Alnwick, an instantly-recognizable local DC TV anchor, reporter and journalist. Melanie will be providing significant insider-knowledge and guidance regarding attracting broadcast media attention to your business and story, preparing for interviews, producing and submitting highly-effective video for broadcast or online business purposes.

What You Get

This packed 5 hour hands-on Internet Marketing and Media workshop will deliver a package of information and guidance you can immediately use, including:

Online Branding and Creative Design
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Website Reporting (Google Analytics)
Digital Asset Management, Optimization and Distribution (RSS) – for Advertising and Marketing
Pay-per-Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Local and Regional
Social Media Optimization and Reputation Management – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube
Online Web Video Production and Optimization
Harnessing and attracting Broadcast Media Exposure

There simply doesn’t exist a more comprehensive, experts-led, cost effective or personally-tailored workshop event in this area for business owners, marketing and communications managers, journalists, new SEO/SEM professionals or other technology and new media practitioners. Don’t bother with online, out of state webinars or academies, online or offline degrees costing thousands of dollars from questionable sources, community-center seminars by industry amateurs, or other less-than-professional sources for a rapid, intense and ultimately valuable infusion of truly local Internet Marketing and New Media knowledge.

Where should I post my advertisements online?
What are the short and long term priorities for better search result rankings, for my website?
What are the keys to successful PPC investments?
Is my marketing budget being spent wisely, integrated and balanced across relevant channels?
How can I make sure my brand supports my marketing goals?
How do I use reports and analytics to support my marketing objectives?
How much time should I spend on Social Media, and why? Can or should I do this myself?
Can my web designer deliver SEO services?
What should I do to get free, effective exposure for my business in the press or news?
What should be in my marketing videos?

We’ll explore these questions and collaborate in the workshop sessions to arrive at the best answers for you and your business in the Northern Virginia, DC or Suburban Maryland region. You’ll get some immediate answers, some strategies to follow and resources to help.

Who Will Benefit the Most?

Local and regional business owners whose websites haven't demonstrated success in drawing highly targeted traffic for more sales
Affiliate marketers who want to increase conversion rates by getting their product pages to come up higher in search results
Webmasters, graphic designers or photo/video experts who want to offer their employer or clients more comprehensive services – not just website building, creative design or basic media products
Bloggers, writers and journalists who need their content distributed and ranked high in search engine results
Anyone who wants to make a career change – to work in-house as an SEO/SEM specialist or begin SEO consulting by learning the latest SEO techniques
Marketers, Advertisers, Communications and PR professionals in a highly competitive industry who are under pressure to increase their brand’s visibility to reach the correct audience, while keeping costs under control

Take charge of your business marketing and advertising budget, get involved in the Web 2.0/Social Media evolution, promote and protect your brand on the Internet!

For more information about the KME Internet Marketing and Media workshop, including upcoming dates, times, location and registration, visit KME Internet Marketing – SEO Training and Education.

Data.gov CONOPS released - Public Input and Public Social Media-driven Information Sharing Welcome!

2009-12-10T09:03:00.000-08:00

Data.gov is a fairly recent Federal initiative with respect to data and information sharing and transparency; i.e. encouraging and facilitating the exposure (by all Government agencies) of verifiable, raw government data/geodata and data tools/visualization techniques to the public. Data can be accessed and downloaded in many formats, for any purpose - including datasets in XML, CSV, Text, KML, KMZ, or ESRI Shapefile formats.

Recently the Data.gov CONOPS was released by the Federal CIO Council, together with OMB, along with a very interesting method and means to encourage public dialogue and input. To help stakeholders "join the dialogue", per se, the "http://www.datagov.ideascale.com" site was developed - essentially a blog with social media hooks (i.e. facebook, twitter, RSS).

I went ahead and submitted an idea recently (to be moderated); as follows - be sure to review and submit your own, and/or comment on mine!

"The Data.gov CONOPS provides a great deal of information regarding the governance and advisory support made available by “POCs” and “Data Stewards” and other roles engaged in populating and supporting data on the site. The CONOPS also describes how Personally-Identifiable Information (PII) is protected, both for submitters and those engaged in the governance process. As well, some existing community forums are referenced as other places to find answers, along with various other “communities” that evolve around dataset contexts.

What would be very useful, however, (and that doesn’t seem yet to be addressed) would be a means whereby direct dialogue could be established between the public and actual SMEs or communities of SMEs, associated with particular datasets. Obviously, protection of privacy and security concerns are to be considered, as are policies including those protecting the government and its citizens against undue influence during procurement processes. However, a method whereby authorized, verifiable government SMEs voluntarily participate, in a moderated, monitored and metered basis, in public dialogue…either scheduled, or on request.

For example, a search on a subject yields several dataset options; yet it would be very worthwhile to have a quick, efficient and timely chat with someone intimately familiar with the information to assist in further research or utilization of the data. Likewise, instead of searching by subject or organization taxonomies, a search by expertise may yield a contact (or perhaps an anonymized background/description of expertise) and appropriate contact method for online, publically-exposed dialogue (one-time, or ongoing). In fact, a search for “expert”, “expertise”, “email” or “contacts” on the current data.gov yields no results at this time.

Many government employees (and perhaps authorized contractors) may in fact be happy to share wisdom and experience in a protected, equitable and productive manner – and perhaps some government roles would include this kind and style of participation as a basis of performance measurement (and as a basis of highlighting the great work of individuals)."

Strong Identity Management and Two Factor Web Authentication in Healthcare

2009-12-06T08:18:00.001-08:00

Here's a very good article concerning the various types of strong identity management, multifactor and two-factor authentication solutions that are necessary for healthcare system and process identity enforcement - recently written by John D. Halamka MD, a self-described Healthcare CIO.

Strong Identity Management

In this article, Dr. Halamka states that he's had a wide range of experience with many of these token-based and tokenless two-factor authentication methods, including security tokens, smart cards, biometrics, certificates, soft tokens, and cell phone-based approaches.

His summarized findings include:

Security Tokens - many challenges and prohibitive expenses.
Smart cards - a good consideration, though requires installation of many readers.
Biometrics - great results, but still requires major technology upgrade for existing PC/LAN infrastructure (this is especially challenging in government and healthcare institutions with extremely diverse and aged personal computer and networking systems)
Certificates - "managing certificates for 20,000 users is painful".
Soft tokens - similar challenges for support, maintaining new software across all desktops.

The article focuses in on seemingly the most effective and efficient solution currently available:

Cell phone based approaches - popular, easy to support, and very low cost. Companies such as Anakam Inc. offer tools and technology to implement strong identify management in cell phones via text messaging, voice delivery of a PIN, or voice biometric verification. Per the Anakam website, their products achieve full compliance with NIST Level 3, are scalable to millions of users, cost less than hard tokens or smart codes, are installable in the enterprise without added client hardware/software, and are easy to use (all you have to do is answer a phone call or read a text message).

Probably the clearest two factor authentication choice to make is between token-based identity management solutions and tokenless authentication. Here's some reasons why token-based 2 factor authentication isn't necessarily as effective as tokenless user authentication (such as that provided by Anakam).

User authentication tokens and other similar devices do not effectively protect against emerging threats, such as man-in-the-middle attacks - since they don't utilize "out-of-band" authentication (i.e. a separate channel for the second factor of authentication). User adoption is a very large obstacle to token-based authentication; an extra device to carry that's vulnerable to many forms of damage and theft simply isn't acceptable. Additionally, significant overhead is required by IT department to provision, manage as an asset, and control the token devices, along with training users in proper use and protection.

Washington DC Business Coaching; Control Your Brand and Reputation, Even When You’re Not Around

2009-11-02T03:04:00.000-08:00

In his October 2009 Newsletter, James Bowles, Washington DC’s leading Executive Business Coach and career transition consultant, outlines the facets of your personal “brand” and reputation – that stand to scrutiny when you’re not around. What do people say about you when you aren't around? Or more importantly, what does your boss, current (or future) client, or other key stakeholders and partners say about you when you aren't around? For example, in a compensation review meeting (when promotions to key positions are being discussed) or simply when your work and additional opportunities to hire (or fire) you are being considered?

The things that people say about you when you are not around is usually called your reputation. A better way to think about it is that it's your personal "brand" – and this is one of the biggest factors in your ultimate success on the job, with clients and around your community. Here's the good news: for the most part, YOU completely control it! Here’s the challenge – to control it appropriately, you may need some essential business coaching, to learn some essential facets of personal brand marketing, reputation management and talent management (a.k.a. “human resource management”).

Three things make up your brand – your skills (i.e. what you know), your experience (i.e. what you’ve done well), and your attitude (i.e. how you act). These are the things that others remember and discuss when the conversation becomes about you, without you. However, having a great brand may not be enough by itself – like any developing brand, marketing yourself is required. Key stakeholders need to know your skills, experiences, and attitudes…so check around. Who needs to know, who do you need to influence? It's wise to make your brand known to everyone, but it's crucial to know who will be making the decisions you care about. Also, it's important to know who influences the decision makers.

Once you know them make a list - then determine the following:

Have they heard of you?
Do they know you?
Have they seen your work?
Have they been positively impacted by your work?
Do they know what you want to do?

Work through this list, thinking of how you can have an impact on the decision makers. Turn the answer to these questions to “yes, absolutely!”. Find ways to work on projects that they care about, or be on teams that work on their projects. The key thing here is that the relationship needs to be give-and-take. Do something positive for them to establish your brand, and maybe they will respond by helping you down the road. Quite literally, the most powerful force for successful career change and accomplishment for executives and business leaders is active personal marketing and partnership with stakeholders to obtain feedback, reflect, and act upon it.

This sort of internal “reputation brand marketing and management” is essential in your career, especially if you’re seeking a career change or in fact re-entering the workforce from a layoff, as a Mom returning to work, or establishing new independent career goals. If in fact your career change results, like so many of these do actually do, in reliance on decision makers and stakeholders you don’t actually know (for example future clients or employers learning about you on the Internet), your personal brand and reputation management actions require a degree of Internet Information Marketing and Management skills (and some social media coaching). This is to ensure you come across the way you desire when people search for you, or your services, on the Internet, in social media channels, or through business and information directories.

For more information regarding DC Business Coaching, Executive Leadership Training, and HR Talent Management, contact James Bowles, Washington DC Executive Coach and HR Consulting. For more information regarding Personal Online Marketing and Reputation Management, contact KME Internet Marketing.

Continue reading about “The Word on the Street (About You)”...

Social Media Simulation and Training Environments, by an Internet Media Coach

2009-10-31T02:00:00.000-07:00

All well-known systems engineering methodologies and enterprise system development programs leverage testing environments. Testing environments can be built and operated for very different purposes, ranging from prototyping and simulation, to pre-production load testing and usability or “Section 508 Accessibility” checks. Specialized SOA testing frameworks are sometimes required, for difficult infrastructure integration challenges. Most major systems that get deployed to large numbers of users also feature a training environment. This working copy of the “real” or “production” environment affords the user and company a lot of protection against mistakes, mis-operation of system functions, and basically allows you to test-drive a system, but reset and try again if something doesn’t work right or mistakes are made. Play around, learn and mess up - no harm, no foul, and the system assets, data and reputation of you, the system owner and others are all protected.

That’s one very difficult challenge to learning social media, for commercial or government employees. It’s nearly impossible to learn how to use social media tools and techniques in an environment that forgives all missteps, can be wholly reset and leaves no incriminating traces of your mistakes or potentially embarrassing, compromising communication skills after you’re done. The best way to learn how to post to Flickr, to learn the nuances of Twitter and engage in the myriad of online dialogue environments is to actually do it “in production”, as they say, which comes along with a lot of actual or perceived personal and organizational risk. That’s the reason most social media programs and users representing significant companies or governments are usually associated with the “Public Relations” or “Internet Marketing and Social Media” department – these folks are trained and expected to know how to engage in public dialogue, within the bounds of legal, regulatory and policy controls (when available).

Much is being written and discussed online currently regarding the state of Government 2.0, and how we’re quickly reaching an impasse where the ability to become a social media practitioner is simply neither supported nor available to employees working behind government firewalls and Internet usage policies. Social media simply isn’t very social or usable at all, to those for whom it would most benefit. As well, the public forum is missing out on a lot of really good insight and dialogue, because so many employers and employees simply can’t afford the risk, or don’t have the capability to learn, understand and test the risks, that come with posting material online.

I’ve written before on the need for “social media governance automation” – social media governance (and Internet media governance in general) is already a hot topic, as a style of content management and workflow decision-making. Before allowing employees to post a blog entry, tweeting or sending a photo through a series of RSS pipes, most larger organizations can certainly set up and enforce all kinds of content management procedures and controls to protect loss of sensitive information or damage to reputation and credibility. But there’s typically no standard method of enabling any and all employees to test this out…and by doing so, understanding better the risks to the organization and exposing the actual talents and capabilities of the employees. Harnessing the latent power of employee social media participation can’t be done, without an effective social media simulation and training environment.

Plenty of companies and consultants are available to provide “social media 101” training, and there’s no end to the social media tips and techniques available through self-style Social Media Evangelists. However, what’s a small business owner, a government employee looking to self-educate or a professional seeking to change careers to do, when faced with the task of learning social media but not having it impact their job, organization, personal or family reputation? I see all the time examples of “learning by doing”, from the very tentative “LinkedIn lurkers” and “Twitter Testers” (who’ve posted a profile, but don’t participate much) – to the “Facebook Flamers” and “Blogging Blowhards” who’ve simply crashed the party and left a trail of privacy exposure and digital embarrassment in their wake (to be forever indexed online).

We can’t all get it right the first time, and as business owners, managers or others entrusted with corporate or government information management and protection, we simply can’t just let everyone under our management or guidance loose to “play” with social media – without a reasonable degree of guidance, coaching, reputation management, training and possibly, social media simulation. It’s not much different than raising your own children – we shouldn’t let them open email accounts, use search engines and social media sites, and in general use the Internet at all (whether via computer, cellphone or gaming console), without methodical and consistent parental guidance in such things as Internet Safety, online etiquette and computer/digital asset protection. My own children are on the Internet, but walled off, anonymized and protected against the typical dangers of online activity – to the degree they’ve proven they need it, and to the degree I think our family and friends need it.

Establishing social media simulation and “real-world” training is achievable, but not yet widely available or possible across all social media tools. Some applications, like Facebook, are already evolving their ability to manage test accounts for developers. Some social media tools, like Twitter and Wordpress, currently allow a large degree of anonymity for user accounts, and no explicit policy for “test accounts” - though like most social media sites, you remain bound by user policies and simple good sense which include removing accounts when you’re done and no longer using them. On the other hand, most social media policies and terms of service are inherently vague and require practical experience to interpret – for example, Wordpress says that your blog should not be “named in a manner that misleads your readers into thinking that you are another person or company”. “Misleads” is the key term – I may create a Blog named “Green Flies”, but most rational folks wouldn’t come to the conclusion I’m actually the Human Fly, or work for “Green Flies Inc.” – so anonymity is preserved, with no explicit misleading going on. Basically, no harm - no foul.

You can effectively set up and manage simulation environment tools and processes, while making sure risks are minimized and participant activities remain clearly within the proper bounds (from the very loose to the legally explicit) of personal, professional, corporate or third-party policies. Since there do not exist common standards, practices or tools for end-user social media simulation and testing, it will be necessary to leverage knowledgeable Internet media consultants or firms (like those I work with) to help manage risks, apply common sense and practical experience, and basically provide the right set of “training wheels”.

What’s key to know, is that there are methods to get online, test and “try before you buy” in the social media environment…working with a new breed of trainers I’ll term “Internet Media Coaches”. An Internet Media Coach is similar to the rapidly developing profile of “Social Media Coaches” – but adds the experience in traditional Information and Content Management, Digital Asset Protection, and Computer Security and Privacy to the base knowledge of Public Discourse and Collaboration using social media tools.

Contact me for more information regarding hiring an Internet Media Coach, or setting up a Social Media Simulation and Training program or framework.

Loudoun County HyperLocal News Online – What’s Next in Loudoun Social Media and Blogs in Suburban Washington DC

2009-10-26T06:18:00.000-07:00

Quite a lot of news, analysis and conferencing has been going on lately about the challenges of the traditional news community, both online and in print. The advances of “citizen journalism” catalyzed by Internet social media tools like Twitter and real-time search are contributing to far-reaching outcomes - from the demise of long-lived newspapers like Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News and the shuttering of the Washington Post’s hyperlocal LoudounExtra.com experiment, to interesting conversations at the recent Blogworld Expo and DC Twitter Conference regarding both opportunities and competitive animosities between journalists and bloggers competing for online “eyeballs”.

When we first moved to Loudoun County in the late 90’s, comprehensive local news was an afterthought to the large newspapers and regional broadcast media, and seemed mostly relegated to the entrenched local papers like Leesburg Today and the Loudoun Times. Of course, the citizen and business population was quite lower, too. Actual or “near real time” news was only gained via local radio and special TV reports, perhaps a radio-shack emergency band scanner, and the growing proliferation of neighborhood online chat, discussion and email groups. Very few non-personal blogs existed, but picking up the phone was still useful to contact local authorities and reporters.

Today, our “situational awareness” of local and regional events is multi-channel and immediate, and can be filtered to precise interests, sources or level of abstraction. This past Friday night, for example, large explosions permeated our neighborhood – a bit odd for this time of year, but immediately provoking both memories of a deadly natural gas explosion in 1998 and our latent, persistent homeland-security uneasiness. Finding out what was happening was pretty efficient – a few searches on Twitter, a look at the local events calendars, a call or two to the neighbors…a homecoming football game fireworks display was the culprit. “Traditional media” coverage was to be found the next day, in game reviews and search engine results…but event-to-analysis lag was at least 12 hours.

Where then, and why, should we be going to find the best “hyperlocal” news as a Loudoun County resident? Is “hyperlocal” truly relevant, particularly in this area of interstitial communities, long-ranging commuters and multi-county politic, economic and government service dependencies? Can traditional publishers of general interest news and the journalists they support coexist with or ultimately become the “Internet Media” Geoff Livingston alluded to in his prognostications for the future of social media?

Read more - at Gateway to Loudoun County

Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media

2009-10-22T14:28:00.001-07:00

Experimenting a bit with Pipes, Twitter, RSS feeds to LinkedIn, etc....follow a nicely "curated" Internet Media collection of Homeland Security/DHS information and tweeting at @dhsinfosharing - and find it under news in the similarly-named Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media LinkedIn group.

#smo2009 Northern Virginia Social Media - Potomac Tech Wire Social Media 2009 Business and Government Roundtable

2009-10-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

At this morning's Potomac Tech Wire "Social Media Outlook" Breakfast Round Table (follow tweets on #SMO2009), well-known presenters Rohit Bhargava, Adam Lehman, Geoff Livingston, Jake Maas, and Moderator Paul Sherman (Editor, Potomac Tech Wire gave the packed event some great insight and feedback regarding how social media's being used in the business community (and a bit of government social media) - along with their prognostications for the future of players and contexts.

What seems like one of the big winners among comments for businesses to address, is the need to much more proactively - and with an ever-present eye towards search engine optimization (SEO) - "engage the middle" of the online press and content producers. Essentially, those blogerati and twitterati among the social media elite are most likely to consume and propagate your corporate perspectives, announcements or points-of-view if these messages are in fact conveyed as a trusted social media source. In other words, become first an engaged, trused social media community member, and this will drive your ability to convince leading social media publishers to participate in and promote your discussion. Consistent, useful tweeting and content publishing within social media protocol begets great re-tweets from those who matter in your particular online ecosystem. Your contribution of material through social media channels will also work well if it represents not only your corporate POV, but also a bit of "content curation" - i.e. hand-picked selection and enrichment of material and online sources pertaining to your topic or niche. Become a social search engine for your communities; this should not only help build your communities and community presence, but this activity across social media channels is naturally search-engine optimized in terms of time, relevance, connections.

Some of the prognostications included advice for businesses to monitor developments in mobile, location-based social media along with new input methods, the automated intersection of social media channels into "Internet Media" engines, the proliferation of buyer-side capabilities for social media ad placement and publisher adspace inventory management, and the increasing focus on "multi-channel integration" of messaging across both traditional and new social media. Products like Google Wave and Posterous were pointed out as great representatives of developments such as these.

This being predominantly a business-oriented crowd, a few audience surveys revealed things we understand in the DC business community, but perhaps those outside don't - for example, very few in the audience used iPhones, most had Blackberrys, and therefore the point was made that much opportunity awaits those who tap this underserved mobile application market. Also, it's apparent that the well-established and financed platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will likely be around for some time to come, so it's imperative that businesses invest some time and energy into establishing their strategy for using these channels.

All in all, a really good and current perspective, from de-facto DC and Northern Virginia social media leaders, on the state of the social media industry and its role in corporate life. Thanks to the retweeters in the crowd and on stage, including @kellyolson, @timharv, @tsuder, @GeoffLiving, @rohitbhargava, @loudoun, @lindahagopian, @fairfax_county and @blackstonetech.

Should Our Business Tweet in the Cloud? Social Twittering for Business

2009-09-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

The jury’s still out for most businesses on whether or not significant effort is made in “tweeting” information via Twitter.com – but the evidence is IN regarding whether or not to simply sign up and prepare to do so.

Your company’s online popularity, reputation and ultimately success is derived from two core things – what you say, and what others say about you. Let’s address these communication elements as “attributed source information” (ASI). “Attributed” from the perspective that there is in fact a known source (though it may be an anonymous ID), “source” from the perspective that it’s the very first sincere representation of the communication or concept actually published online, and “information” in that it’s not just some data or graphic fragments, it’s actually a message or concept with enough context to drive interest.

If it’s non-attributed, non-source or just bits n’ pieces (i.e. not “information”), there’s not much you can do about it as “evidence” – but, just like any good lawyer or PR consultant, you can shape, evolve, dispute, share or otherwise react to the material to meet any of your agendas.

Back to Twitter (or any other social media channel), it’s a simple prospect – the more ASI you post about yourself, the more you’re likely to get posted about you. It’s common practice these days, and basic SEO “block and tackling”, to post as many “billboards” about your company as possible around reputable Internet sites and directories, with short marketing messages and direct backlinks. In fact, most businesses should take every opportunity to create a standard billboard, profile or directory entry among all popular social platforms that allow it – this also helps preserve and protect the core “brand”. Therefore, most companies should establish an “unprotected” (i.e. publicly viewable) Twitter ID, create a basic profile, and establish a minimally-acceptable, germane and objective list of followers and regular corporate news updates (ASI). Re-tweets and requests to follow, and engage with you online, will be a typical “community-managed” affair, and be likely kept to a minimum with few “incidents”. This is truly no different than online press releases, many of which these days include and syndicate the press release ASI across multiple social media channels, including Twitter.

Some may see this sort of bland, generic Twitter land-grab as contrary to the “spirit” of the medium, and therefore a “poser” action – but Twitter use is ubiquitous enough now in the business and marketing community where this may no longer be the majority vocal opinion. It simply must be done, and is expected. All professional Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants should recommend this.

Beyond this generic use of Twitter is where the potholes are. If your company is prepared to engage, across multiple agendas and subjects, with the online community that WILL develop as you post additional ASI – then you’ll need to develop your policies and procedures for Twitter, as a part of your broader “public discourse” strategy and risk-management framework. These include addressing what you post (i.e. who the authors will be, the backlink strategy, the recurrence and subject-area focus, the degree of personalization, etc.), and how you proactively and/or reactively deal with ASI that others post, in response to your own. Apply some method to the madness.

Otherwise, don’t count on a lot of ROI from your Twitter account, though there are simple benefits from just being at the game. Also don’t be too worried that your Twitter presence, albeit somewhat passive and conformist, will create any significant PR issues. Don’t be surprised, though, if your competitors end up driving and shaping the online conversation (and collecting the customers) with their own risk-managed ASI, in your absence.

Corporate Blogging Framework - Where to Start?

2009-09-11T07:07:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot published and dissected over the value and methods for successful corporate blogging, and the intersections between corporate and employee use of social media. What's not been discussed much is the application of Systems Engineering Methodology, within the Information Management Architecture Domain, to implementation of corporate blogging. Being that a corporate blogging program is essentially part of a corporation's "Information-Sharing Line of Business", integrated with and supported by other corporate operational domains (like Marketing & Communications, IT Operations, and Organizational Change Management), it's therefore an IT program -and IT programs are best managed through standardized IT Investment and Systems Engineering Lifecycle methods.

To start, therefore, a corporate blogging program, a framework should be established for program planning, resource scheduling and alignment. This framework will help generate a program CONOPS (concept of operations), solution architecture, program plan and performance measurement indicators. These program artifacts, as any IT Project Manager worth their salt understands, are essential to establishing early buy-in, investment approval, compliance and risk mitigation.

Blogging does introduce 2 very important elements in particular to your Marketing & Communications (Marcom) efforts. First, it’s a new (or another) online content management and distribution platform for corporate information. It needs to be integrated into your overall Information Management infrastructure. Secondly, and most importantly, it’s a new forum for online conversation between your corporation, its employees and/or representatives, and the public. The blog speaks directly to individuals, and they to you – and this conversation needs to reflect the right balance of personable though moderated and useful dialogue.

Here are some facets to consider, in suggested priority order, when establishing your corporate blogging framework - there are many more details and methods to consider (both standard and contextual to a particular company) once the framework matures; these are only initial guidelines.

Governance

1. Executive commitment and approval – share the idea and collect feedback regarding corporate blogging from key executives and corporate legal, policy, public relations and marketing. Simply raising and discussing the initiative, along with some basic education (not everyone understands blogging or microblogging) and examples, will go a long way towards buy-in, integration with other Marcom activities, and a successful governance framework (i.e. who approves what).

2. Champion/Evangelist – establish the “Corporate Blogger Champion/Evangelist” – a well-coordinate program will require some ongoing, insistent initiative by someone who’s ready to answer questions about blogging and social media, and coach others through the learning processes. This person will also take the lead regarding translation of blogging needs and processes to IT requirements, own the ROI – i.e. setting up and reporting tracking metrics, observing the readership trends, adjusting the blog content, process or template, etc.

3. Create a basic, sample decision-making process. Start with the example that a corporate officer/employee announces they will be speaking at an upcoming industry event. Start backwards with the decision-making:

• Who “presses the button” to publish the blog entry?
• Who reviews, edits and approves the final content?
• Who reviews and approves the draft submission?
• Does the employee need approval to create the draft content?

Note that you may end up with several decision workflows, depending on what kind of blog entry it is. At the end of the day, well-balanced blog content will probably be a mix of “corporate” managed content, “employee” direct submissions, “syndicated” content (i.e. brought in or copied from somewhere else) and user/reader submissions. The blogging framework may in fact become multiple blogs – but try to start with just one. There’s a lot of trial and error along the way – and there WILL be some slip-ups in what gets published and how; simply be prepared to deal with this as a course of business.

Note also that your overall "Content Management" workflow may end up with blog entries authored and published internally, and via some kind of content management or "social media governance" process, get published externally (i.e. to your Internet-hosted blog).

Employee Communications and Awareness

1. Share the initiative with employees and trusted advisors – start an internal conversation, perhaps a volunteer working group. What do they think?

2. Survey/canvass your employees – are they already active in social media? Do you have any “employee blogging stars” already, with personal online brands? (Check yourself – “Google” employee names and your corporate name – is anyone already an accomplished blogger?) From the reverse perspective – are there reputation management concerns to address, i.e. an erstwhile professional blogger is less constrained with Facebook postings?

Authors

1. “Authorship” is a tricky subject – some great corporate blogs are written by corporate executives, others are wholly supplied by direct employee submissions. Some are simply automatic syndications of content published elsewhere. As the blog matures, it’s likely many authors will be attributed. Start simply for now – establish the “corporate” persona (i.e. “this entry published by –your company-”), and who will actually “be” this persona initially. Should the blog be immediately successful, it’s important to be ready to “reveal” the person behind the persona.

2. For your core authors, determine how they’ll be attributed. (a) Do they want to be personally identified, or anonymized? (b) We recommend only first names for authors who are essentially unknown publically; if the author is already a well-known, public figure online, already associated with your company – then use the whole name. No other PII (personally-identifiable information); no sense in creating new opportunities for spam or online security problems. (c) Use anonymity/corporate persona really only for authorship of posts that truly aren’t suited for personable dialogue – like press releases or announcements.

Topics

1. What to post about? The corporate blog really shouldn’t be just another advertising, marketing or PR vehicle – it’s an opportunity for more personable and honest dialogue. You seek to share information with your readers that you really want and appreciate their input about. (Of course, the ROI is enhanced by inclusion of marketing messages and advertising techniques; to be further discussed). Think about both your SEO keywords AND major sections of your website – what are the top 5 keywords or “tags” you’d use to categorize the blog entries? For example, “zzz”, “xxx”, “xxx News”, “zzz people”, “zzz events” – where “zzz” is your corporate name, and “xxx” is your topical keyword.

2. Align with industry news – while the blogging initiative may eventually result in many threads of dialogue across many topics – start first with your primary marketing agenda, and in particular, items that are timely in the industry. The very best corporate blog entries match targeted keywords with current industry events or news – people exploring popular media-generated news and events should also “run across” your related information.

Content

1. Regardless of the actual subject matter, the blog “content” can take many forms. Simple text, links, external or embedded attachments, photos, videos, scripts/widgets, flash movies, rich internet applications (RIAs). Most search engines can index most of this content, in terms of the text embedded within – but straight HTML text is probably the most important content from an SEO perspective. Focus first on getting the blog text, tags and titles correct, and perhaps some limited use of photos/illustrations. Remember a blog enables syndication of its information to many other websites, mobile devices, readers and applications – always consider how easy it is for others to “consume”, read and re-purpose your content through RSS.

2. Other content can be added as (A) part of the overall blog design (it is a website, after all), and (B) as reusable digital assets are identified within your company, that you’d like to leverage into the blog. The most important point is that the search engines and readers see a constant stream of new, unique, interesting, timely, relevant headlines with basic supporting information and specific keywords, that effectively directs further action (i.e. “read more”, “contact us”, “discuss this”, “support this”, etc.).

Blog Platform/Channels

1. The best objective for a blog platform, is to use an internal, corporate-hosted software product – many content management products (like Sharepoint and Drupal) offer this (though you’ll need to get the components necessary for external publishing “through the firewall” to your external, Internet-hosted website). Wordpress is a free, popular product, on the other end of the spectrum, and can be customized to match your website’s branding, look and feel. (Note – for very sophisticated, highly customized and high traffic blogs, you’ll probably need to spend some money – but the blog initiative budget should be considered as part of your overall Marketing and IT budget).

2. If you’re not ready to devote the time and resources to install/implement an internal blog platform, Internet-hosted blogging services can be leveraged – though you’ll need to consider how to protect these "digital assets" hosted outside your company. There are no guarantees that anything posted on 3rd-party services like wordpress.com or blogger.com will be maintained or protected to your standards – at the very least, blog content should be created and protected internally, before published externally. In fact, such services are known to simply disappear quickly into a larger corporation's acquisition strategy. Take a look at the popular platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Blogsmith - there are pros and cons for each (While I'm a big Wordpress fan, the Blogger capability for FTP'ing content to other websites is really why this blog is hosted by Google).

It’s also important, when using a hosted service, to set up the publishing and links in a manner that generates maximum SEO and Conversion value – by proper linkages back to your website, through syndication of the content back to your site (via RSS widgets or RSS to HTML converters), and by basic copywriting techniques. For example, the external blog “catches” readers with some information, but to get more, and also to subscribe for monthly updates, readers are linked back to your website contact page/subscription process.

3. If you’re really not ready to implement an actual, corporate-branded blog – consider starting to blog in existing forums – i.e., an employee is a member of a LinkedIn group, and posts regular “discussion items”, responds to industry blogs and discussion, etc. It’s a good entry vehicle to testing the “art of public discourse”, choosing and testing keywords, etc.

4. If you do create a blog, whether internally or externally hosted, be prepared for some design/configuration activity, with some knowledge of HTML/RSS required – it is a website, after all, and there are most definitely useful guidelines available for properly designing and optimizing blogs vs. more traditional sites.

After considering these guidelines, you'll likely be ready to construct the Information Management Framework, composed of the Systems Engineering artifacts indicated above, that will enable your Corporate Blogging Framework. Or maybe you're just ready to start blogging!

Stay with this blog for more information about Corporate Blogging Frameworks, or contact me directly for specific help.

SOA Infrastructure Testing Framework - Flexible, Scalable by Blackstone Technology Group

2009-07-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a great posting by Sara over at Blackstone Technology Group's SOA and Integration Practice, regarding a "flexible, scalable SOA infrastructure testing framework" she and others developed on their Homeland Security Information-Sharing program.

She relates "We’ve implemented a highly-efficient and data-driven framework to test an enterprise-scale, highly available SOA infrastructure environment. In the same amount of time that it took to previously build a single test scenario, we were able to develop the initial framework implementation that can quickly support multiple scenarios that include any permutation of components and transports."

In other words, look to new SOA-driven testing frameworks and approaches like these, to most thoroughly and efficiently test new SOA/ESB infrastructure deployments. The "old ways" won't work.

Initiating a Corporate Social Media Presence – Unleash Your Inner Star Power

2009-06-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

Social Media’s a scary animal, especially for companies or organizations that are accountable to stakeholders, policy, law or any other governing entity that exists to mitigate risk. Also, social media is an online collaboration channel and tools domain that’s most appropriately and effectively utilized by humans, i.e. individual personalities (preferably employees) – vs. corporate personas or third-party services. So how does a company begin to use social media, break into and contribute to the online dialogue, and avoid reputation issues while maintaining appropriate accountability?

Find, identify, nurture, coach and ultimately unleash your employee social media stars – they’ll be the face of the company, the purveyors of online dialogue, and will most likely do a great job at it. Why and how?

First of all, the social media platforms and tools are the dominion of the Internet-literate, the digerati, typically those more inclined and interested to communicate online at least as often as they relate offline (or by phone). It’s usually easier to find and identify folks like this, than it is to train them – since most open source social media skills can only be learned “in production”, i.e. without a “training” environment and IDs – most people who easily navigate social media have already learned how to use these tools on their own, with their own personas or via external interests. They’ve already taken some risks, exhibited some courage, and learned some lessons. Hire or identify a “Social Media Evangelist”, one like this with proven and public credentials, to help guide your strategy and tactics. Then canvass your employees, survey the web, find employees who are active social media users already. These are the seed candidates, the American Idol “you’re going to Hollywood!” group.

Next, filter and weed – not all users of social media use it well, or use it in a manner consistent with your corporate culture, public presence, company policies or communication styles, etc. Some may be “power users” – but really don’t write well enough to represent the professionalism of your company, notwithstanding general acceptance of all kinds of online slang and abbreviations. Some don’t typically consider the “bigger picture” or context-specific etiquette when posting, for example where the post might end up – and how it might be interpreted. After multiple rounds of syndication, digging, mixxing, friendstering, tarpiping, etc., posts might too often get blurry between business and pleasure, thereby losing effectiveness of intention (and probably becoming just a bunch of noise). Those who really do represent and focus on their interests or agenda using well-formed language and current, accurate references – with obvious intentions and open agenda – are the targets for your external “Digerati” (i.e. your “Social Media Liaisons”, or “Corporate Communications Liaisons”).

Now you’ve crowd-sourced the “experts”, it’s time to initiate them, molding their expertise according to your company’s interests – while not unnecessarily diluting interesting personalities. This means a structured program of personal brand coaching, training and perhaps apprenticeship in the finer arts of public relations, communications and Internet Marketing 2.0 – as delivered via Social Media channels and aligned to your company’s traditional web presence. (Your company should have developed a “Policy on Public Discourse”, or something like it, governing communications by employees in public and on the Internet - we've implemented this at Blackstone Technology Group). Since there are not yet very effective or available tools for automating social media governance, demonstrations and internal discussion with the Social Media Liaison, as postings are made, work best (i.e. learn by example) – and then a review and commenting process of postings by the “trainees”, as they start to participate. While the social media landscape is always changing, and new tools and methods are popping up all the time, the foundations of successful public discourse on the Internet don’t really change:

Be real, be yourself, be wise to current policies and public relations objectives of your company and context, don’t spam or be negative, don’t miss opportunities to appropriately use marketing keywords, and by all means give back to the communities you participate in.

Success in this process yields the right number and distribution (i.e. across various topic areas or corporate functions) of employee social media “stars”, who most effectively represent the very positive, engaged and personal attractiveness of your company and their personal brand on the Internet. Not only will the company prosper through social media use, but employees will also find their voice and opinion more readily exposed, thereby promoting a lot of pride in their contributions to their company, their fellow employees and their individual careers.

If you’d like more information on this subject, just drop me a (social) line. I’ve been experimenting with this process from both the employee and employer perspectives – it certainly does take a lot of in-person guidance and coaching to learn to effectively use social media without harming your personal reputation, career or corporate/stakeholder interests.

Government Social Media Reputation Management in the Cloud

2009-06-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

During this morning’s IAC breakfast, discussing “Transparency, Collaboration and Web 2.0”, a panelist made a very interesting point. While the US Federal Government’s use of Internet social media services and cloud-based information-sharing applications is well underway, albeit at the very earliest of stages (mainly due to significant policy, privacy, security and simple “newness” issues), by far one of the major risks lies with accountability.

Accountability in collaboration and information-sharing environments is typically achieved to some degree by association of metadata with the information packages being exchanged, or with the “containers” of online events and the trusted identities of those participating in the dialogue. With social media applications and contexts like Twitter or Facebook, however, there are far too many ways that the “information packages” (i.e. unmanaged conversation bites) get exposed, syndicated and shared – disassociated from what I’ll call the “accountability metadata”. Accountability metadata might be described as one part records management (provenance, chain-of-custody, attribution, etc. of the actual material), one part situational awareness (i.e. the UCORE model; who, what, when, where regarding the actual event context being discussed), and one part “trust in context”, or “reputation” (i.e. popularity index, authority index, security attributes, etc.), and one part semantic accuracy (i.e. the topics and language being used is consistent with the context of discussion within which it’s introduced, for example according to a NIEM namespace).

"S-CORE" for "Social Media Core Information"?

As an example, the tweet associated with this blog entry is in fact an “information package”, albeit made up of unstructured data (as far as I can manipulate). Within the Twitter universe, there is an association (or “assertion”) of accountability metadata with this Tweet, so long as you’re a member of the community and can view my profile data, link references and prevalent topical themes. My profile data is associated with an employer and other communities, which themselves provide additional accountability data. But what happens when the Blog Tweet is Twitterfed, gets Tarpiped into Identica, over to Friendfeed, into Facebook and finally its RSS feed repurposed as a discussion item on someone else’s blog widget?

The original metadata isn’t carried along, and therefore some degree of manual intervention may be required to respond to non-attributed, out-of-context or otherwise mis-purposed data. Google searches may return search results containing my tweet language in non-intended contexts, thereby possibly enabling alternative or even incorrect interpretation. A homeland security social media “tweet”, for example, from a first-responder regarding a health-related assessment may be determined by HHS as inaccurate and possibly dangerous as most obviously interpreted by the public. Enter “Online Reputation Management”.

Online reputation management is a significant industry in itself (many local Washington DC Internet Marketing companies provide it), focused on making sure search engine results aren’t creating or promoting a false or unwarranted image – of a person, company, or product – because of overwhelming yet unverified online information posted to the contrary. Back to the HHS example – the erroneous tweet works its way into Google search results via multiple channels (and perhaps aggregate or federated search results), and subsequently becomes “the truth” because it’s on the first page of results. HHS or some other responsible, validating entity must now engage reputation management techniques to deliver more, better or different information into many of the same social media channels, in addition to a couple of its own highly-authoritative channels, to counter the ultimately false search engine results.

This may be part of the reason that Data.gov is so far a producer only of raw data, vs. “information” – since information carries with it expectations and actually delivers a degree of unstructured accountability that’s very hard to define, manage and monitor on the Internet. Structured data is far easier to manage, since it typically isn’t shared via social media (at least with its structure intact), and structured metadata is easily embedded. Citizens can certainly help resolve semantic inconsistencies, can establish some level of “social trust” by using the data, and can prove usefulness (and therefore legitimacy) by creating popular applications – but citizens aren’t really accountable to the rest of the Federal Government’s constituency, and its reputation. Ultimately, organizations will look back to the Government for trust and accountability with respect to information packages (vs. data) they can use in legitimate business ventures involving social media.

However, the Federal Government’s foray into producing information packages for consumption by public social media will likely be constrained for some to come, until industry can come up with a generally accepted standard and technology examples to permanently associate “accountability metadata” to unstructured information payloads released in the wild. This might then be followed by an oversight agency or program that could automate perhaps some of the Federal Reputation Management tasks that would then be necessary – enabling many more useful, unstructured conversations in public social media, moderated by trusted Government sources. Perhaps from the cloud.

Probably Interesting Information

2009-06-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

(Warning – hyper-theoretical stream of probably uninformed semi-consciousness to follow…)

In considering the possible types of information that might need to included in Enterprise Information-Sharing programs, while sifting through my TweetDeck, something’s become quite clear – most of our Government information-sharing exercises are all about “Signals”, “Data”, and “Information” that are already known (at some level) to be “required”, “useful”, or “possibly interesting” – judged as so by existing processes, policies, roles, business rules and perhaps knowledgebase ontologies.

I’d like to, however, receive and share more information from the government that’s “probably interesting”, but that hasn’t yet been confirmed as so by them, or me and my community.

This happens all the time in social media, where I’ve subscribed to or participate in an information-exchange forum based on a particular knowledge context (and within my own agenda), and routinely view information that’s been posted within this context for unintentional use….i.e. it “is” interesting to the poster, who, by virtue of their understanding of community context, assumes therefore that it’s “probably” interesting to others in the community. Not “possibly” (which if so, would be posted to a non-specific public forum), but “probably”. Destined for “unintended, though probable use”.

Over at data.gov, some “possibly interesting” information is being made available for further consumption and mashing – but some thought was already applied to determining its likely level of usefulness, constrained by security requirements, information-sharing policies and the role descriptions of the posters. Therefore, a lot of it isn’t interesting, or probably interesting, at all.

Now, if a mashup application had relatively unfettered access to a variety of government data sources, from which it developed a “knowledge map”, and could semantically compare this map to a map of my own personal knowledgebase (i.e. my blog, my articles, my social media conversations, things I like to read, favorite books, etc.), and then react (perhaps with some basic guidance from me) to contextual “information-sharing events” (i.e. the arrival or transformation of certain information) with intelligent alerts that some “probably interesting information” were available – now that would be something.

Kind-of like when my 5-year old arrives home from preschool, with loads of “probably interesting information” about other families, teachers, etc. Much better than gossip.

Information-Sharing with Cloud Semantic Ontologies

2009-06-05T03:46:00.000-07:00

Quite a mouthful, the title of this post. However, this language is becoming more and more critical to the objective of cross-domain information-sharing, and is becoming more and more easy to actually use (by the public!) in building information search, discovery, fusion and correlation/analytical applications.

A while ago, I was introduced to the semantic wiki technologies and communities of Knoodl (knoodl.com), which is a mechanism for like-minded persons to collaborate on building semantic vocabularies, using open standards like RDF and OWL. Basically describing the terms and language of a topic area in a manner that can be expressed, via XML, for consumption by computer applications. So when a message arrives in your system with information labeled "SAR", or a query is sent forth with the same acronym, a test of this word against the machine-readable vocabulary can determine what the likely meaning really is - "suspicious activity report", "suspect action report", "search and rescue", "specific absorption rate", etc.

Knoodl (by Revelytix, Inc) truly enables bottom-up "crowd-sourcing" of vocabularies within specific domains, from agriculture to military and homeland security - and it's now available as a free, cloud-sourced (Amazon's EC2) application with hooks for automated applications to use. What's most helpful, is that this vocabulary-building environment allows business, mission and technologists to create great machine-readable ontologies/knowledgebases, without having to actually use programming languages or edit XML. The vocabularies created or uploaded are immediately accessible through a query standard called "SPARQL", with full support for Knoodl's role-based permission model.

More barriers are now pretty much gone for forward-thinking agencies to collaboratively describe their data and information, expose (the vocabulary) it in a manner that enables accurate representation and description within a domain context, and leverage a "Web 2.0" semantic technology platform for free in conjunction with the rapidly-growing number of data query and mashup technologies already under way (like data.gov). Some very forward-thinking technology vendors are already leveraging this technology into their "Operational Intelligence" cloud-based platforms, such as Vitria's M3O Web 2.0 BPM suite...and we all understand that business entity definition and business process identification/management is at the heart of most successful SOA implementations.

Homeland Security Keeping You Safe with Social Media

2009-05-28T04:41:00.000-07:00

Secretary Napolitano requested that this sidebar, from an article PARADE Magazine published about the department in the Sunday, May 24, 2009 issue titled “We Are Prepared and Resilient,” be sent to all employees. In it, she describes the department’s top priority: to “help keep the nation in a state of readiness and help assure the American people that we are prepared and resilient.” The sidebar is available on PARADE’s Web site at http://www.parade.com/news/2009/05/10-ways-homeland-security-is-keeping-you-safe.html. The full article is available at http://www.parade.com/news/2009/05/we-are-prepared-and-resilient.html.

TOP TEN WAYS HOMELAND SECURITY KEEPS YOU SAFE - within this list, are these two social media nuggets:

1) In a sign that they are keeping up with the times, DHS and FEMA now have their own Twitter pages. The agencies post important updates including travel alerts, security threats, weather warnings and other alerts.

2) The U.S. Coast Guard, whose expanding role in national security is vital to several DHS objectives, now uses videos on YouTube to prepare, train and communicate with its agents across the country.

So the question is raised - "what about social media governance, should it be required?"

These uses of "social media" (it's not really a "conversation", but just another kind of alert/notification or simple content-sharing) don't really require the kind of governance I've espoused in earlier posts - it's where individual government representatives are using social media and representing themselves (i.e. uniquely individual personas, rather than a whole department/agency/office), where governance is more necessary - if you've got many individuals publishing information, from the same department or agency, there should be some automated controls over protection of sensitive or private information, proper attribution, record distribution management (i.e. keeping track of what's shared as a matter of government record), release of unverified or possibly conflicting information, and possibly definitions/use of acronyms. However, it shouldn't go overboard - just enough to help and encourage both the government and the public experience a comfortable trust in the dialogue that ensues.

While commercial entities are more advanced than most public service agencies in leveraging social media for public dialogue (it's hard to find major IT consulting and information management shops, for example here at Blackstone Technology Group (@blackstonetech), who aren't already "twittering" both from a corporate perspective and by individual employees) - some degree of automated social media governance (for both inbound and outbound information-sharing) may likely open the floodgates to full realization of the value of this media by governments.

Protecting Your Legacy Personal Digital Assets

2009-05-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

Heard a great segment today on NPR's "All Tech Considered" - when you die, what happens to your Internet-hosted digital assets? For example your Facebook wall, your Twitter account, your gmail emails...Most providers of these services have policies from their perspective, and essentially won't turn over any information without proper legal intervention, but have you personally prepared for this? Who specifically do you want managing your domain names, your social IDs, reading your emails, changing your passwords?

It turns out this is quite a quickly-developing "sticky wicket" - mainly because of the diversity of digital assets you may have, the different reasons or causes you only know for maintaining them, and the different circles of friends or business partners who collaborate with you, through one or another online identity. "Legacy Locker" was the first business out of the gate mentioned to be dealing with this, and they are "a safe, secure repository for your digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends and loved ones in the event of death or disability."

This sounds like a great idea - but with many more variations of service, capabilities and legal policy to follow. For example, if you own a business and die, how are your customers automatically alerted to this, and to the fact that the IDs/passwords you've maintained for their digital assets are now "unmanaged" or otherwise exposed to loss or possible theft? I think we'll be discussing maintenance of personal digital assets and identities much more very quickly, as social media quickly drives up the value of these objects.

IBM Impact SEO – Internet Marketing Guidance from a Global Content Network

2009-05-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

A very timely and interesting element of a set of marketing principles delivered to IBM business partners at this week’s IBM Impact 2009 conference included this recommendation listed as #1 – attend to your SEO (Search Engine Marketing), and definitely be social about it.

While this isn’t obviously news to most larger companies, and perhaps smaller, who are already rapidly finding Internet marketing as a very cost-effective and valuable outlay of advertising budget, it is interesting to see one of the world's largest marketing engines as IBM promoting SEO to all of their partners. This promotion of online marketing tactics is primarily geared to helping build and extend their own sales channels, but IBM is explicitly noting that Internet Marketing and SEO is an absolute essential activity with clear and significant ROI for everyone.

Although the advice and guidance provided was basic (and promoted services that could be purchased from a key marketing partner), the message was clear. Search engine marketing and optimization, including not only your business website but your social media channels and syndicated content, is an absolute necessity for businesses to thrive in these difficult economic conditions. (It's very important also for Public Service organizations, to help ensure essential and new online services are also easy to find using search engines, in multiple languages.) The subtle messaging to business partners was also clear, at least to those who understand Internet Marketing – by improving and optimizing your site, as an IBM technology and/or service provider, IBM itself benefits from the additional page juice now flowing in more expertly from business websites and hyperlinks, along with broader exposure of IBM syndicated content. This basically results in a "tide that lifts all boats", at least those boats floating in the same stew of keywords and topical phrases.

IBM’s “content network” and search engine presence stands to grow exponentially through providing this sort of advice, especially for keywords, terms and topics which may not include specific IBM products or services, but may require them for implementation. If you're not currently "linked in" to a content network like this – explore outbound links to key suppliers or value-added resellers that not only benefits them, but benefits you in the long run.

Program Technical Management Office Situational Awareness – COP and UDOP

2009-04-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

Most large IT Investments in Federal and State governments require a Program Management Office (PMO) function to help the buyer (i.e. the Government) manage the IT planning and implementation activities from cost, schedule and compliance perspectives. PMO’s are most often the domain of project managers and cost-management specialists, “running the numbers” according to contract language, quality and risk management protocol, “Earned Value Metrics” and other compliance or oversight controls.

More and more frequently, however, the PMO is tasked with understanding, advising and managing spending or compliance concerning very technical facets of the program, ranging from strategic Enterprise Architecture and SOA alignment, to more tactical preparation or review of technical standards, models and engineering methods. In essence, the PMO’s responsibilities begin to overlap more frequently with and require close coordination with programs domains historically more organizationally-distinct – i.e. the “Enterprise Architecture” group, the “Budget and Acquisition” group, “Centers of Excellence”, etc. More formal mechanisms and structures are required to define the PMO’s “Technology Monitoring & Management” role, and integrate these “PTMO’s” (Program Technical Management Office, or "IT PMO") governance processes with those at the enterprise level.

By establishing a “Program Technical Management Office” structure, Situational Awareness (SA) with respect to the IT investment is more easily achieved. By SA, I mean the same set of real-time, continuous factors and outcomes that are defined in Wikipedia as “the perception of environmental elements within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future.” In an IT investment environment more and more driven by opportunities for leverage and reuse, SOA-aligned collaboration and information-sharing, and “open source” or “Web 2.0” capabilities, the “environmental” elements that shape the success or failure of an IT investment require SA attention by a PMO, or PTMO. A PTMO might be charged with understanding and managing:

The availability of data, information and information access methods elsewhere in the Enterprise, that can be leveraged for the new program;
The pending completion of an Enterprise or Domain regulation or standard regarding an IT component or method – that should be considered in planning and technology acquisition or testing;
The status of IT investments elsewhere in the department or business community that overlap the program at any layer of the program or technical architecture, and might be reused; or
The status of 3rd-party software or services from a release perspective, or from an availability perspective, made so by regulation, MOU, SLA or legal agreement at the agency or broader community level.

The “top down” view of all the IT Investment-related factors influencing a program’s acquisition and success is a view that most CIOs already know to build, through a combination of relationships, “dashboard” tools and reports, and system operations views. Their “Common Operating Picture” (COP), if you will. It’s a view “Common” to those involved in high-level decision-making, IT investment review, and enterprise strategic planning.

Situational Awareness of an IT Investment, however, isn’t fully accomplished by the top-down view, especially in a new world of SOA-driven Web 2.0-enabled capabilities. The bottom-up, user-defined view (or “UDOP”: User-defined Operating Picture) is a critical contributor to the program leadership’s decision-making.

For example, there may be subject-matter experts who independently, or collaboratively, analyze and correlate information critical to the evaluation of an IT component, and that should be easily surfaced and discoverable by the PTMO. The PTMO may actually solicit point evaluations, tests or “mashups” of data from stakeholders that, while not part of the “formal” acquisition or systems engineering lifecycle set of artifacts, is nevertheless an important information point or indicator of possible risk.

How are UDOP principles created, encouraged and leveraged by PMO’s, via PTMO’s? It starts with identification and use of internal collaboration capabilities, and exercise, as possible, of social media tools (i.e. tools that enable user-driven feedback, collaboration, and information management). Lots more discussion to go on this topic – the takeway is that Situational Awareness about an IT Investment is most thoroughly delivered via addition of “Technology” focus to a PMO, and approaching the collection, correlation and visualization of information regarding the program and investment from BOTH a COP and UDOP perspective.

Automated Social Media Governance and Government 2.0

2009-03-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

With the proliferation of Internet-based tools and forums to share information, deliver announcements or warnings and create collaborative networks, it’s become apparent that “self-policing” strategies for controlling and managing the risks involved in delivering content through the corporate firewall can’t mitigate most risks. Most corporations and government agencies do indeed require, as terms of employment and various legislation, that care be taken and policies or procedures followed when engaging in online public discourse or otherwise moving content from the corporate-controlled environment to the public Internet. Over the past years, many good tools and governance frameworks have been developed as a routine matter of enabling Internet content posting, distribution and syndication – but these have mostly focused on automation, protection and monitoring procedures associated with corporate-managed content. “Corporate-managed content” is defined as information products or artifacts that are specifically governed and managed by a combination of corporate policy, processes and information management systems.

The availability and use of Internet-based “Web 2.0” tools (when used with collaborative intent termed “Social Media”) from inside corporate and agency firewalls are exposing additional types of information and styles of communication that don’t fall neatly into the corporate-managed information bucket. These social media information types and communication styles are proving quite difficult to manage from many perspectives, including legal compliance, risk management, security, personal or corporate reputation management and overall productivity and return-on-investment (ROI).

Newer communication styles – such as those that result in creation of unmediated copies or renditions of original content - include things like “microblogging” (i.e. “Twitter”) and self-syndication, i.e. publishing content to sites like EzineArticles, Digg or public blogs, and enabling subscription to RSS feeds. These communication styles are used expressly for the purpose of enabling public propagation and information-sharing, for reasons ranging from actual corporate or agency public service mission, to marketing or simple relationship and reputation-building.

Newer information types (to be considered from a corporate information management perspective) include RSS-formatted messages, micromedia (i.e. small, highly-portable, low-bandwidth and standardized image or video files), tags and attributions, social media press releases, backlinks, comments and pingbacks – these are the currency of social media, and that which provides permanent, public evidence of collaboration.

Within the so-called “Enterprise 2.0” or especially "Government 2.0" context, these communication styles and information types aren’t so problematic – employee to employee socialization using corporate-managed Web 2.0 style tools is a low-risk, high-return activity, so long as it’s managed and monitored effectively. Many organizations have grown to understand and leverage information management tools to help control risk, productivity and costs associated with creating, publishing and sharing information internally. Systems that provide web content management, records management, business process and services registry/repository management, document management and various flavors of logging/auditing capabilities are well known and broadly-implemented. However, when these social media activities and content surface for public consumption on the Internet, unmanaged by corporate information management systems and associated with explicit or implicit attributes reflecting ownership, participation, intent, decisions, or opinion – the corporation or agency’s risk profile can rise dramatically, and asymmetrically.

Consider this use case. A government agency wishes to post a photograph and description of a road closure on the Internet, making sure that the information not only appears on local “traditional” media Internet channels and the agency’s own website and subscription channels, but also in local “user-generated” community websites, blogs, and discussion forums, as well as larger 3rd-party user-generated media sites that allow localization through keywords or other metadata. Basically, the news needs to get out to both the “pull” environments (i.e. online traditional media), and the “push” environments (i.e. online social dialogue environments). What’s the process?

A specific agency individual may be locally-empowered and trained to follow a procedure where, once the content is approved and loaded to the agency website with an associated press release, to further distribute the content through social media channels such as twitter, local community blogs and discussion groups, flickr and youtube. This activity, by this individual, can not only take a while, and miss important notification channels or groups, but also raises a number of questions regarding records management and government accountability:

What keywords are used, to be sure that search engines find the information most efficiently?
Are ALL policies, regulations and guidelines being taken into account, that may or may not be directly enforced by the “home” agency, but by other Federal oversight groups?
Can the individual express opinion, either in the text copy or keywords?
Are different social media channels and tools leveraged for different types of alerts like these, in different situations? To reach different audiences?
Is there a standard and agreement by 3rd-party site owners that enables some degree of “authorized attribution” to the notice – i.e. this notice, and only in its issued form, is in fact “official”?
How are records maintained of these postings and 3rd-party site updates? What about responses, are they monitored and associated with the postings, across multiple social media channels?

What’s the process for correcting misinformation, or “fat-fingering”?

The list of questions and concerns can quickly become very long, and range from the very abstract and strategic to very precise and tactical.

Therefore, the concept of “Automated Social Media Governance” is raised. During the process of creating, staging, publishing, distributing and monitoring digital content released to the Internet via Social Media channels, there exist many opportunities to (A) automate these new information lifecycle processes, (B) automatically enforce social media information management policies and (C) automatically monitor and respond to associated social media events.

It is important to note here the distinction between “digital content” and “digital assets” – in this paper we’re not focusing on digital content that’s expressly generated and monitored for revenue-generation purposes, and that has explicit monetary value (for example, widgets, photos or documents for sale). Rather, we’re focusing on digital content that by itself has no explicit value, but simply is an outcome of the corporation or agency’s communication or collaboration mission with the public. Digital Asset Socialization requires automated social media governance, but also requires additional governance and techniques associated with intellectual property protection, financial management and transactions, and cost recovery objectives.

Automating information lifecycle processes isn’t a new concept – but automating the business processes and 3rd-party tool utilization required to leverage social media, in a manner that integrates with internal SOA/ESB, Content and Records Management capabilities, is. Consider the creation of a blog-style comment with keywords and trackback url(s) within a corporate content management system. The creation of this information package can be appropriately recorded and approved with existing tools. The actual auto-selection and approval of 3rd-party destinations, “scrub” of content and keywords for appropriateness or policy, creation of a standardized “information exchange package” and release of information with appropriate attribution and security enforcement from the official source of record to the “open source” Internet community is a new concept. This concept isn’t yet built into typical enterprise web content management and publishing systems, and is usually always a mishmash of personal or office initiative, conflicting, ambiguous or casually-interpreted policies, and redundant, overlapping activities with no strategic plan. The ability to automatically track, monitor and perhaps respond to misuse, reuse or other manual or automatic reactions to the content that’s been posted isn’t part of typical enterprise web content management systems, either.

Should social media governance be automated, and to what extent? There’s one broad camp of opinion that espouses social media should be largely unfettered by heavy-handed policies and restrictive, burdensome data management processes (though obviously required in most secure government contexts) – it interferes with creativity, natural human interaction and the original intent of “social” Internet tools. Then there’s the very risk-adverse, highly-accountable camp of realists who by mission, job function or legislation must consider very closely the impacts of allowing unregulated information-sharing to cross corporate or agency boundaries of control. Regardless of the side of the control spectrum, there’s no doubt that some degree of social media governance automation can be helpful for risk mitigation, productivity or value optimization reasons. Simply including social media posts in the web content management workflow is probably a good idea, if only to record the outbound communication and targets, as well as preserve things like photos and videos in the format they were released for chain-of-custody and legal discovery purposes.

Blackstone Technology Group is currently helping many commercial and government clients navigate the Social Media environment, whether from a governance, policy and investment perspective, or from an information management and process automation perspective. This topic is raised now in nearly every discussion where user-driven collaboration and communication results in production of digital content that’s currently not managed or monitored by corporate systems, processes or policies. Blackstone can provide the expertise your company or agency needs to understand information sharing and management concepts associated with the use of Social Media and Web 2.0 tools, including implementation, governance, opportunities and risks. Blackstone can help you automate all the various facets of Government 2.0, Social Media Governance and Information Management, whether for purposes of publishing or collecting information through social media channels.

Government 2.0 Coming Up

2009-03-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

From the tweetdeck: RSS to @blackstone’s microblog pings from #gov20camp 3/27/2009 complete w/tarpiped flickrs, tumblr’d friendsters, LinkedIn group comments and delicious GovLoop tags – maybe Ustream, Youtube or Podcast, too. Or just read our blog, or my blog. Socialize - it's the new granite.

Nonprofit Funding and Marketing with Social Media

2009-03-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

The outlook for continuation of difficult economic situations around the world certainly doesn't bode well for nonprofit organizations looking for new donors. What's interesting and provides some hope, however, is the confluence of new social media open source tools and mashups, the awareness of these new information sharing and collaboration sources on the Internet across multiple generations, and the transition in intent to use these tools from last year's political campaigns to the new Obama administration.

One experiment underway that deserves close watch is a Loudoun-based nonprofit organization called "paws4people(TM)". In the midst of a full-on social media and internet marketing campaign, that I'm helping to coordinate, this assistance dog foundation is poised to demonstrate maximum utilization of any and all social media capabilities available - in the face of rapidly deteriorating donor funding. They're calling the campaign their "2009 Nonprofit Charity Stimulus Plan" - and it's off to a great start.

The campaign is divided into three "digital asset domains". First is the paws4people Assistance Dog Foundation and activities of the charity itself, with great blogs, tweets, tarpiped social photos and tail-wagging commentary by the still-in-college founder. Second is the core fundraising machine called "charityraffles.org", leveraging Internet online raffles offering cash prizes for donors, along with the philanthropic benefits and write-off. Third is the really interesting part - where the fundraising machine can actually be leveraged and used by other nonprofits to supplement their own income stream - thereby benefiting ALL nonprofits that participate, in addition to paws4people. Called "NPOFundingSolutions", this cooperative social funding opportunity that pays nonprofits for raffle ticket sale referrals will test the usefulness, reach and efficacy of social media and search marketing/branding techniques to shore up the donor base where none may have existed before.

More to come on the strategy and outcomes of this local bellweather initiative; keep an eye on this new social-media, search-engine driven recipe for hope.

Social Media for Loudoun County VA Businesses

2009-02-26T15:21:00.000-08:00

(As also published this month in the Loudoun Chamber of Commerce Biz Connect newsletter).

As the Obama administration settles into office this year, what’s described as the “most connected ever” group of leaders are quickly focusing on how to leverage the groundswell of “social media” use and expertise demonstrated by the campaigns. Social media, proven useful in politics, is rapidly being adopted by students and families, and is dramatically changing the landscape of traditional news reporting. But is it good for business, here in Loudoun and Northern Virginia?

Social media may be difficult to define, but you’ll know it when you see it. It’s about talking back to the web, sharing your opinion, and participating in a multimedia dialogue among interested people in public – anonymously or not. There are many styles of online conversation and tools – from those focusing on photos or videos (like “Flickr” and “YouTube”), to reviews (like Yelp”), to those focusing on profiles, expertise or favorite bookmarks (i.e. “Facebook”, “LinkedIn” and “Delicious”). For business owners and employees, the prospect of engaging customers in a public, un-moderated dialogue (that can’t be erased) can be daunting. Local businesses typically aren’t used to this – but it’s already an expectation of most online customers.

Read more at the Loudoun Times...

Government 2.0 Club and BarCamp - the Unconference

2009-02-25T09:53:00.000-08:00

Planning to Attend Government 2.0 Camp this March..."Convening the Tribe of Government 2.0".

Follow my Twitters at http://www.twitter.com/tedmclaughlan.

Hypertext and Digital Text to Web 2.0 - Explained

2009-02-23T04:39:00.000-08:00

Here's a great video on why linking is an essential part of digital writing, found over at Debbie Weil's Blog

Digital Asset Socialization - and Other Mashonyms

2009-02-20T12:45:00.000-08:00

The practice of leveraging digital asset management and exploitation techniques combined with social media tools to provide new ROI opportunities from existing corporate information assets.

Socialize your digital assets (but still treat and manage them as information, that has both explicit and implicit value).

That's right - another new mashonym - i.e. mashing up some key terms and acronyms pulled from the swirl of Web 2.0 to come up with a new one....

Fun with terms I've invented so far:

- Mashonym - Web 2.0-driven mashups of social media acronyms
- Avonym
- DAS - Digital Asset Socialization - see above
- Ecovent - Ecosystemic (i.e. ecologically perceived and managed) events - i.e. the cause-effect context of a temporal, geospatial event to faceted ecosytems.

Information Sharing: Government vs. Open Source

2009-02-19T05:54:00.000-08:00

I had the privilege of spending many hours over the past several days immersed in expert discussion about Information Sharing, from several different perspectives.

In the "open source" Web 2.0 community (at last week's Potomac Techwire Internet Outlook 2009 event), the consensus seems to be that there's a short period of "wait and see" ahead of us, to find out which online information-sharing social media capabilities will become the next big thing...Twitter's very much wait and see, Facebook has excellent fundamentals and a strong core framework, and 20-somethings on Myspace are increasingly "icked out" by the quickly growing population of 40-somethings. Everyone in the room raised their hands when asked if they were on LinkedIn. Regardless of the platform and tool, one thing was certain; online information-sharing and user-defined data aggregation (i.e. mashups) is in full-blown growth mode, and privacy is dead. That's right, according to a panelist, no one these days "should have any expectation at all of online data privacy, and should behave accordingly".

In contrast to this statement, the esteemed panelists at yesterdays AFCEA breakfast on information-sharing and collaboration, from DHS, ICE, EPA, DoS and other government agencies, led a discussion on the rapidly-developing information-sharing standards, architecture frameworks and collaborative initiatives - all within very controlled privacy policies and programs. By many laws and regulations, personal privacy and its protection is a very serious matter within the firewalls of the Federal Government - but the "experiments" happening in many areas concerning use of social media are quickly mandating re-examination of privacy policies and associated security control mechanisms. There exist many very successful information-sharing programs in DHS, for example, that leverage user-defined collaborative tools and Enterprise 2.0 techniques (including the Homeland Security Information Network,, or HSIN, and TSA and FEMA's use of blogging and stakeholder feedback tools). However, there aren't yet many examples of "open-source" social media utilization occuring across the public-government security boundary; on most networks, access to tools like Facebook or Twitter is prevented.

Perhaps the most promising potential enabler of public-government information sharing initiatives is the "National Information Exchange Model" (or NIEM). This is a program originally created at the Department of Justice to standardize reporting and communication of data regarding law enforcement; it's now run by the DHS to serve as a standards framework for message exchange across the entire Homeland Security community - including all security echelons, and potential communication across the firewalls of government. Tuesday's "RFI day" for the software vendor community interested in assisting this effort was well-attended; representatives from every major software company and Homeland Security systems integration and technology consulting community were there, from IBM and Microsoft to Deloitte and Blackstone Technology Group (an SOA/ESB and Information Sharing technology consulting company). As a very well-supported standard and program, this should rapidly enable semantic data exchange among all government entities, as well as set the stage for standardized exposure or consumption of open-source data. Vint Serf himself (a.k.a. the "Father of the Internet", now Chief Evangelist for Google) noted, as the keynote speaker, that the NIEM program showed great promise, and was likely the kind of initiative that would greatly assist in conquering some of the next "big issues" coming along that he was working on, including "cloud-computing-to-cloud-computing" integration and expansion of the Internet to outer space...along with our so-called "private" information now controlled by Facebook.

The Brand Ambassador for Government 2.0

2009-02-05T06:34:00.001-08:00

Great post recently about the Government 2.0 "Brand Ambassador", in FCW by Mark Drapeau.

"It’s easy to see governments and their agencies as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. But that notion only prevails because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyperconnected world.

As private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments also must adapt if they wish to communicate more effectively with their citizens and stakeholders — their customers.

Just like private companies, agencies need to manage their public identity — their brands — to create trust and loyalty. "

This is great insight, as organizations such as DHS are stepping up their efforts and awareness around leveraging Social Media, both from a "push" perspective (i.e. communicating and engaging in dialogues w/constituents), a "pull" perspective (i.e. accepting feedback), and an "awareness" perspective (i.e. monitoring the social media landscape for operational insight).

Read more....

Facebook - Records Management and Digital Preservation for the Masses

2009-01-19T05:02:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks my Facebook "wall" has started to yield a treasure-trove of high-school era picture, stories and flashbacks, including associations of names to groups, events and interests I never then fully appreciated - but do now.

A few years back, I was addressing a US National Archives program called the "Electronic Records Archives" (ERA), a program aimed at improving the nation's ability to "indefinitely" (i.e. even after Google and Microsoft go out of business in the year 3000) preserve government electronic records - including emails, online chat, digital photos, video and other data. One of the key challenges was promoting this program to users and organizations, and coming up with ways to encourage authors and managers of electronic records to identify, tag and contribute items to the records management system (to ultimately be assessed and possibly saved "forever" in the ERA system).

Facebook is apparently the new "National Archives For the Rest of Us", for non-government, social media records. It's easy to "tag" items with various metadata, and it's easy to associate items by various taxonomies and folksonomies, organized for example by social networks, family-groups or subject-matter. Conversation threads are preserved, and can be "mined" for additional data and linkages. Contributors are encouraged and even driven to harvest, describe and post previously unseen data (some which probably should remain unseen) - by all kinds of social, family or friendly pressures or interests. "Official" social and family records are being created in a crowd-sourced environment that values, rewards and encourages records management techniques and promises some degree of digital preservation (assuming Google or The Wayback Machine's cache of Facebook lasts even longer than Facebook itself - and Facebook is now hosting the National Archives, it seems).

As an online digital archive, Facebook is also simply an interactive "time machine" of sorts, that seems to become really entertaining as material begins to surface that's over 25 years old (or "antique" in automobile terms). Like satellite radio (which all of a sudden offered access to songs you hadn't heard in 30 years), Facebook offers access to "time capsules" of photos, letters and relationships that had been boxed up and stuck under beds at childhood homes.

However, I'll point out that as the National Archives does categorize material according to sensitive security classifications (i.e. "Top Secrect" and the like); so too might it be worthwhile for individuals to observe similar categorizations or "personal classifications" for material they would consider archiving with (forever) in Facebook, but probably shouldn't.

Twitter meets Information Management

2009-01-08T07:08:00.000-08:00

Had a conundrum the past few days with Twitter - among several IDs, one was being populated with a mix of "business" and "community" news. With twitter, there's no clear way of categorizing tweets or conversations by tags or categories; the conversations are aggregated but reflect not necessarily a single topic, but either (1) a non-purpose-driven dialogue, either instance-based or continuing, or (2) or purpose-driven dialogue, where the communicators intend to resolve a question, promote something or provide alerts/updates.

In traditional knowledge management terms, communities typically exist as (a) communities of interest (COIs), (b) communities of practice (COPs), or communities of purpose (COPRs). Since the ultimate outcome of these sorts of communities was to add to and share elements of a knowledgebase, the concept of "communicating for communications or simply socializing's sake" isn't really included in these three community-type definitions.

Twitter is, however, mostly just that - a medium for socializing, and not necessarily with the intent of ultimately contributing managed, categorized information to a defined knowledgebase.

So, my conundrum was how to apply knowledge management-style discipline under a particular Twitter ID, i.e., focus the dialogue under the ID on "generating and sharing knowledge about a particular subject" vs. "communicating simply to chat, socialize or otherwise build relationships about multiple subjects".

The approach, constrained by Twitter's lack of subject-based categorization, was to have one Twitter ID focused on the "general communication", and another focused on a subordinate group of those communicating on a particular topic, for information-sharing purposes. The topic-centric Twitter ID and resultant dialogue could be termed a Twitter "COI", with particular subordinate dialogues devolving to "COPs" or even "COPRs". The "general communication" Twitter ID and dialogue I'll term a "Community of Communication" (or "COC"; when the interests of the dialogue sway towards simple alerting/updating) and a "Community of Socialization" (or "COS"; when the interests of the dialogue are simply to get to know one another better, as people).

The probable proliferation of twitter IDs to follow, and the need to manage the production, attribution, categorization and storage of information that surfaces in these online dialogues - that's Twitter Information Management, and it's a whole new bunch of activities I hadn't planned on needing to deal with, but must.

Information Management and Internet Marketing - Essentials for the Bad Economy

2008-12-16T06:10:00.000-08:00

It’s a pretty straightforward economic reality hitting local and regional businesses right now - how to drastically reduce marketing and advertising expenses, while continuing to attract new customers and grow revenues. In any economy, good or bad, it is absolutely essential that your business, service and products continue to be represented and advertised in public media - in order to attract new, paying customers. This is Information Management 101 - but in the public domain.

Read more about this Business Internet Marketing and Information Management topic, and why Internet Marketing, SEO, and Online Marketing and Advertising are topics worthy of considerable attention and exercise for all businesses right now, large and small.

Records Management without Information Management

2008-12-15T11:41:00.000-08:00

A recent Op Ed piece in FCW highlights the fact that Records Management responsibilities in the Federal Government have been abdicated by half of those responsible, namely GSA. While NARA focuses on records management policies, schedules and the science of digital preservation (i.e. the "Risk Management" side of the equation, as FCW asserts), GSA was ostensibly charged with the Information Management side of the equation (the "economy and efficiency" aspects) - i.e. how do agencies, as a practical, tactical matter, create processes and leverage technology to actually enforce records management policies and populate the government's record catalogue with well-formed records and metadata? Regardless of whether the records should be preserved indefinitely (i.e. by NARA) or not?

There certainly exist enough policy guidance, solution guidance and eRecords expertise within the Federal community to attack the records management problem, as well as legions of Enterprise Content Management vendors who include records management as part of their suite of tools. The biggest hurdles, however, typically are "organizational change management" and "business priorities".

From an organizational perspective, it's a very difficult trick to modify processes, leveraging existing tools within existing organizational structures and incentive frameworks to convince employees and contractors to habitually recognize, define and post records vs. non-records. From a business priority perspective, it's kind of like health insurance - records management technology investments are made to protect against anticipated legal risks to the organization, so the amount of prioritized risk associated with inadequate recordkeeping drives the level of investment. But many organizations don't feel they'll be "sick" any time soon, or the degree of risk is simply too low to bother with.

I haven't seen many instances in government where a very clear business case for automated records management capabilities was created that held up in the prioritizing of business and mission objectives - to the extent that it became a clear, proactive priority. Usually the business case amounts to a reactive procurement of just-adequate capabilities in response to policy investigation or enforcement actions. And every good Information Manager understands that without a good Business Case, strong Information Management programs and governance are nearly impossible to create or measure.

So the Op Ed piece is right on, in that there's no real body of responsibility manning the shop from an Information Management perspective for dealing with records - but there's also not much guidance, oversight or actual working examples of change management frameworks or business case models to support, either.

Knowledge Workers 2.0

2008-10-31T06:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a very motivating video about the role of Information Management professionals intersecting with the discipline of Knowledge Management and Web 2.0.

I Am Knowledge Worker 2.0

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: collaboration office2.0)

Integrated IT Governance Processes for IT Organizations

2008-10-09T15:00:00.000-07:00

The processes involved in managing and governing an IT system lifecycle can be extremely complicated and are frequently uncoordinated - these include governance processes associated with capital planning and investement reviews, acquisition management, portfolio management and enterprise architecture governance (which includes Information Management and Data Governance). If the various governance processes, governance bodies and ultimately the decision-makers in an organization aren't coordinated - IT programs are doomed to marginal return on investment or significant delays, cost over-runs....you name it.

Blackstone Technology Group's expertise in this area, developed over years of IT service consulting to Commerical and Government CIOs, IT Managers and Financial Control Officers, is now packaged in a solution offering termed "IT Governance Process Integration". This is the first end-to-end services consulting offering in the market that enables integrated alignment and coordination of ALL IT governance processes involved in procuring and maintaining an IT system investment.

Read more about Blackstone's IT Governance Process Integration offering...

Digital Asset Optimization Maturity

2008-10-01T03:54:00.000-07:00

"Information Management" is a very broad term, and many consultancies and standards groups have tried over the years to wrestle it into ontologic submission - categorizing the subjects and domains most often along the lines of product release, availability of subject matter experts (SMEs), or the Enterprise Architecture model of the day.

Taking a view of Information Management from the angle of "Digital Assets", I've created a view of the myriad of subjects and topics that are relevant to delivering (whether it's your stuff or someone else's) actual, monetized value on digital information you generate. Digital Assets are defined as instances or packages of digital content that are delivered as information to consumers, with the express intent of deriving monetary value. Much of your digital content may not end up described this way - i.e. directly targeted at generating revenue, for example internal company handbooks or photos. I will make the case that for most organizations, there's a veritable treasure trove awaiting discovery and leverage - of digital information that certainly can and should be packaged, managed and optimized as digital assets.

This view begins in the very well-known, though still complex domain of "Enterprise Content Management" (ECM), where the digital asset is first born, shaped and staged for its life - whether restricted to private consumers or "in the wild". As the view depicts, this stage of maturity around recognizing, catgorizing and preparing to manage your digital assets internally is absolutely essential - but obviously only the first step to realizing value.

Much more to come in the next posts...

Internet Reputation Management - for Government

2008-08-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

A really great article on Internet Reputation Management concepts for government was recently posted at FCW, entitled "Who is Watching Your Online Image"? In it, Andy Beal speaks to the cautious but imperative initiave of public service agencies to extend eGovernment initiative into the Social Media space, most especially the blogosphere. But this extension of services and participation in the online dialogue is double-sided; on the one hand, this may offer great advantages to the government agency and its constituents, on the other hand, it needs to be carefully controlled from an online reputation management perspective - though government blogging and social media participation is precisely what may really help, in cases where the agency's reputation or position is besmirched.

Here's another recent take on Internet Identity and Reputation Management, from Fox 5 News in DC - more from a consumer and business perspective, than government. But the tenets and advice still apply, even more so.

Information Management and Marketing

2008-08-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

While the domain of "Information Management" is well known to extend to both internal and externally-distributed information assets, it's not so obvious that this domain requires a certain degree of Marketing & Communications expertise. Information governance processes that extend outside the corporate boundary are typically for purposes of compliance, protocol, or other business agreement - though in the past few years it's become more and more necessary to apply information governance techniques TO Internet (or Intranet) Marketing efforts, and leverage Internet Marketing techniques FOR delivering information governance.

There are two binding elements between Internet Marketing and Information Management. The first are the search engines and their automated indexers (i.e. "bots") - Internet Marketing techniques leveraged to influence search engine results (i.e. Search Engine Optimization/Marketing) should very much reflect corporate governance of externally-managed or monitored information assets. In order to mitigate risks and derive maximum value from content distributed on the Internet, as part of any traditional Information Management strategy, Internet Marketing techniques are necessary.

The second binding element is the "Web 2.0" movement. While an organization can to a large degree control the use of its own information, as it exists within its managed governance processes and properties, it can't necessary control how others reuse, paraphrase, comment on or otherwise generate new information that points back to the original. Again, Internet Marketing techniques known as "Social Media Optimization/Marketing", aimed at controlling or at least influencing the generation of collateral, related information, can be a useful tool in extending corporate information management governance.

Below is a simple diagram that trys to depict where the various Information Management and Internet Marketing domains would come into play, under a holistic view of a corporation's information ecosystem. (A following post will go into more detail regarding each of the domains). For a publically-facing enterprise striving to establish the most comprehensive Information Management governance processes, policies and outcomes it can, Internet Marketing capabilities and activities are absolutely essential. For the newer breeds of Search Engine/Social Media Managers - there's a growing demand for a very solid foundation in traditional information management and governance engineering.

Federal Government Social Networking and Enterprise Data

2008-08-07T07:49:00.000-07:00

I recently participated in a very interesting discussion about mechanisms and issues for leveraging external (i.e. outside the firewall) social networking tools in the Federal Government; for example, browsing and executing searches in Facebook, using Flickr for socializing and recieving comments on photographs, and participating in "open" blog discussions.

While this isn't necessarily a new issue, and many agencies are gradually enabling "Government 2.0" for both their constituents and employees/contractors (more quickly in the Intelligence arena), the rapid growth and pressure to utilize these tools for mission purposes is unmistakable and requires more rapid, cross-government address (or at least really well thought-out and vetted models for experimentation, leverage, best practice development). Commercial businesses are generally ahead of the curve (from government) in addressing this need, and "Information Governance 2.0" is fast becoming an absolute necessity as an overlay on top of existing "Data Governance" programs.

In a past post, I mentioned the recent adoption of a new DHS directive concerning "Information Sharing" - but this addressed "Enterprise Data" from a very secure and compartmentalized perspective (i.e. DHS itself), and not necessarily from the "Enterprise" of the entire Homeland Security Community of Interest (COI - public and private). While government enterprise data management and governance strategies are certainly advancing rapidly, due in large part to the DOD and Federal Enterprise Architecture efforts of the past years, these strategies don't yet consistently include information and information-sharing processes that cross the government-public boundaries. As more and more success in information-sharing is derived from cross-domain and cross-organization socialization, using Web 2.0 information-handling and manipulation tools, a new category of "Enterprise Data" will need to be governed - i.e. "Open Community of Interest Enterprise Data". These are subjects, conversations, expertise identification and information products generated specifically as a result of open collaboration by the Enterprise, co-mingling Enterprise-sourced data with open source data.

By "Enterprise-sourced Data", I also don't mean data that was intended all along to be produced for public consumption; rather, data that wasn't intended initially for public consumption, perhaps because it was organizationally perceived as having little value outside the close community of practitioners and mission owners who use it. "Enterprise-sourced Data" in this sense would basically consist of government records, i.e. the raw evidence of the activities of government, put forth for the community with which to create collaborative, innovative value (most likely unplanned or un-envisioned by the original "stewards").

Basically, citizens are saying "show us some stuff we've not seen before, and we'll mix it up with stuff we have to create some brand new concoctions". Federal employees are, likewise, saying "I'd like to throw some raw ingredients into the big pot, and harness some crowd-sourcing energy to expose new uses for the material I'm producing, for all to benefit from".

Commercial businesses aren't necessarily very far along in explictly defining, for purposes of Information Governance, what constitutes "external" Enterprise Data vs. "internal" (i.e. what raw ingredients can be thrown in the communal pot). There are laws and corporate policies for particular kinds of data and information exchanges, to be sure, but for most information that exists in social discourse without explicit categorization (how do you categorize a blog entry that says "hey, that cat I saw this morning, its coloring might be useful for highlighting this area of our website") there are only general guidelines, such as in "Sun's Guidelines for Public Discourse".

A lot, however, is left in these guidelines to some degree of professional interpretation, experience-based decisions, and simple trust. While this latitude and trust may be good enough for many businesses (it's just money, after all), in many cases the government's mission is too sensitive (we're talking lives at stake) to rely on "guidelines" - vs. explict and automated policy.

Once we get closer to a broad acknowledgement, definition and model for "Open COI Enterprise Data" in the C2G paradigm, this should help address and enable the growing need for the government to engage and utilize "open source" social networking tools, for public benefit. Start by examining your data governance program, and trying to extend it to information that doesn't yet exist, but would be created, should your data be shared outside the firewall and pounced on by Web 2.0-equipped constituents.

Which Search Engine to Focus On, Publishing and Marketing our Digital Content?

2008-06-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

Just about every day, I use Google - probably at least 20-30 times a day. I'm not alone, obviously, as by many measures Google is the most utilized search engine on the Internet. There are others, of course - even Google points this out in its analytics results. But which ones are best for what kind of tasks, and what kind of people use each? (The diagram in this post isn't mine, but has been distributed about the web for some time...).

From a pure organic Internet Marketing perspective, your organization's website really should focus on page ranks in Google - both for the volume of search traffic probable (since Google's indexing reach is so large, and their paid content distribution is so broad), and the fact that Google's results are very tied into the overall context of the Internet and relationships among online content, including websites, blogs, social media, discussions, wikis, documents, etc. Google is also leveraged as the core index behind other, 3rd-party search engines like AOL and Netscape).

It's apparent, however, that MSN and Yahoo search are much more focused on the specific content and relevance of the actual webpage, vs. the webpage's popularity or connectedness to others. This may be why, in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns targeting consumer products (i.e. people looking for specific items), it's typical to get much better results (i.e. "clicks") with a Yahoo campaign, while PPC campaigns focused on generating "buzz", exposure or simply large increases of broad-based traffic (i.e. those searching for information, guidance, resesarch) do better with Google.

Persons surfing the Internet using search engines do have a choice, but typically gravitate towards one or the other based on the kind of "Internet Information Consumer" they are, and have been. Don't use the Internet much, but want recommendations and guidance? Try Ask.com or Altavista. Are you a real newshound, with a predilection towards online portals and email
provided by a provider like MSN or Yahoo? You'll probably use their search tools most. Really into comparison-shopping and deals? You'll probably start with Google, but may also know to use meta-aggregators like Dogpile (which aggregates paid ads along with organic) or Mamma.com. More experienced Internet professionals, looking to focus in on particular topics might use tools offering advanced categorization and analytics, such as Vivisimo ("Clusty") or Surfwax. For those looking for opinion or perspective on particular topics, the best places to visit are sites with Web 2.0 feedback technology, that focus on the topic (or have specific sections). Flickr's an example of a place to find recommended or popular photographs of specific subjects.

Here's a real good index of Search Engine tools to use, for particular purposes. Note it includes not only pure search engines, but pre-built directories with search built in.

The point of this topic for organizations and businesses, is to know your customer, and understand how your digital assets (i.e. websites, documents, blogs, comments, articles, ebooks, etc.) are managed. Digital content destined for publishing and distribution on the Internet, to be indexed by search engines or commented on by readers, should be carefully organized, managed, monitored and tracked for maximum effect. By carefully monitoring how your content is used and what others do with it, it's easier to create a marketing plan that's correctly targeted to the right search engines and audiences. Focusing on Google may get you great traffic, but it may not be the traffic you're interested in.

Information Management and Sharing Policy

2008-06-05T06:41:00.001-07:00

A new "Enterprise Data Management Policy" was signed this week within the Homeland Security Department - to those unconcerned with the business and technology of information management, this won't create a stir...but to those "fighting the good fight" across the Federal Government information-sharing and management parochial boundaries, it's a valuable new tool, at least 2 years in the making.

In essence, the Directive, administered by the DHS CIO, outlines the department's policy with respect to sharing, contributing and leveraging wherever possible Enterprise data, and the Enterprise data management procedures and assets made available through the EDMO (Enterprise Data Management Office). Having lived through many of the difficulties associated with sharing and reusing data between Federal components, agencies and departments, with respect to policy differences, metadata and semantic disagreements, security classification issues, or simply reluctance to participate and share, this Directive and the work that went into it is truly a sea change for this sector of our industry.

The Directive by itself doesn't necessary accelerate or improve information management solution implementations or associate business and mission outcomes - but it gives some teeth to the sincere efforts of information management professionals and public servants, business data stewards and IT governance managers in seeking to facilitate their efforts through consistent, collaborative application of Public and Federal Information Management standards.

Information Management and Local Social Media

2008-06-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

To start things off, here's a locally interesting Government 2.0 story that kicked off 2008, where a local government official complains via email about a real estate blog's veracity, demands material be removed, and refuses to "respond via the blog" - thereby provoking, as we understand all too readily in the Internet Marketing and Social Media industry, a firestorm of comment and much broader exposure of his unfortunate position.

Information Management, as an IT discipline to care about and pay attention to, includes not only the information you and your organization generate within your "domain", but also the information you, your organization, and everyone else generates on the Internet regarding your virtual domain.

Welcome to Information Management Consulting

2008-06-02T10:23:00.001-07:00

This blog will focus on many subject areas regarding Information Management Consulting