Nearly every business conducting business in the DC or Northern Virginia area (and elsewhere) is finding that more and more effort is required to manage their  online reviews and feedback. Particularly for local or regional businesses, the very first thing online consumers do in considering to visit or buy, is to seek out online reviews, search for online reputation or trust signals, and canvass their social media networks for trusted advice and opinion. More often than not, the aggregate perception developed in a consumer's mind, from this online collection of "reputation proof points", will overcome ANY direct marketing, advertising or SEO efforts being made. It's hard to fight back, and lawsuits really aren't the answer. This recent example here in Northern Virginia and DC may result in some compensation - but the damage is done, and will last for a long time on the Internet. Establishing consistent, durable and very positive online messaging isn't ...

Selling Federal Enterprise Architecture A taxonomy of subject areas, from which to develop a prioritized marketing and communications plan to evangelize EA activities within and among US Federal Government organizations and constituents. Any and all feedback is appreciated, particularly in developing and extending this discussion as a tool for use – more information and details are also available. "Selling" the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in the Federal Government (particularly in non-DoD agencies) is difficult, notwithstanding the general availability and use of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF) for some time now, and the relatively mature use of the reference models in the OMB Capital Planning and Investment (CPIC) cycles. EA in the Federal Government also tends to be a very esoteric and hard to decipher conversation – early apologies to those who agree to continue reading this somewhat lengthy article. Alignment to the FEAF an...

The Digital Services Governance Recommendations were recently released, supporting the US Federal Government's Digital Government Strategy Milestone Action #4.2 to establish agency-wide governance structures for developing and delivering digital services. Figure 1 - From: "Digital Services Governance Recommendations" While extremely important from a policy and procedure perspective within an Agency's information management and communications enterprise, these recommendations only very lightly reference perhaps the most important success enabler - the "Trusted Community" required for ultimate usefulness of the services delivered. By "ultimate usefulness", I mean the collection of public, transparent properties around government information and digital services that include social trust and validation, social reach, expert respect, and comparative, standard measures of relative value. In other words, do the digital services meet expectations...

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

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

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

The role, impact and usefulness of the "Solution Architect" (i.e. "SA"; to the "Enterprise Architect" or "System Architect") has been clarifying for several years across the IT Consulting community, particularly given the increasingly complex nature of SOA, Cloud-centric and Multi-Platform solutions required to meet increasingly real-time, agile and resource-constrained business information management requirements. The SA's role is essentially to be the IT architecture, engineering and resource management lead, as an IT solution is first conceived, planned and begins implementation. Very often, the SA's efforts are initially delivered as part of a proposal - complete with an engineering plan and schedule, high-level system architecture and product list, plus a cost estimate (both labor and direct). This typically assumes the proposals are meeting pre-defined acquisition strategies - i.e. they need to be "Firm Fixed Price", ...

For the purposes of local or regional economic development, Internet exposure of marketing material is incredibly important. However, understanding whether the Internet exposure is actually supporting goals and objectives, and to what degree it's generating useful interaction, isn't easy, and certainly takes more people, time and expertise to work out than this simple blog post describes. But enabling simple visibility of high-level metrics can be very useful, very quickly. The term "Internet exposure" is used here to encompass all types and methods used by persons to interact with marketing content, from seeing display ads or using a mobile app to browsing a website or providing feedback through a related social media channel. At the very highest level, there are several measures of Internet exposure and subsequent interaction that can be reported with easily-accessible metrics - following are two of the most important for strategic economic development planning and ...

The Information Technology (IT) inventory of HR role and position labels is broad and deep. IT position descriptions may be closely associated with actual black box technology (like "Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Administrator" or "Storage Area Network (SAN) Engineer"), or they may describe roles in a methodology-driven context required for IT success ("IT Project Manager", "Functional Requirements Specialist"). No IT job label is more loosely defined than the "Architect", even with a long string of descriptive adjectives ("Component Services Integration Application Architect"). Taking the "Security Architect" role for example, this person usually does, as well-understood, develop models and abstracted designs (for easier communication) to help build and deliver IT security requirements through engineering methods, constraints, tools and investments. However, does this "Architect" create detailed designs a...

Yesterday's Loudoun Economic Development Commission meeting was full of interesting items relating to the business of promoting, revitalizing and expanding Loudoun County's economic base - including recent "Beta" launch of the New Department of Economic Development Brand and Website (try it out, provide feedback!), plus an announcement by the Chamber of their new "Rail to Loudoun" website initiative soon to come. One of the more compelling and integrated-community initiatives was the discussion about whether Loudoun should implement an "Arts and Culture District" to support the Leesburg District. The relationship between economic development and a strong arts and culture environment is indisputable - as was put "the more businesses that are attracted and retained in the area, the more the arts and cultural district will flourish, thereby creating more foot traffic and revenue for the Town and County." Read more at the Gateway to Loudoun C...

(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 rang...