“If you need a consultant for marketing or proposal work, and your company is involved in the identification of individuals, Bredemarket can accept the work.”
Because…I learned at 7:30 that morning that my individual identification employer was no longer my employer. Several of us lost our jobs that day.
As it turns out, my view of my employment future was overly optimistic.
“Maybe I’ll find a new full-time position in a couple of weeks, and I’ll again have to reduce hours and scope.”
As it ended up, I didn’t…and I haven’t.
Your credentials are too impressive, so we are moving in a different direction.
And I’m paying full price for my healthcare—no employer subsidy.
While some are concentrating on the political aspects of this story, I would like to focus on the technological aspects.
“[Dr. Katherine] Keyes is cited in a paper titled ‘Changes in mental health and substance use among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,’ which appears on page 52 of the MAHA report and lists JAMA Pediatrics as the journal. A representative for the journal confirmed to ABC News the paper does not exist.”
Anybody who has paid attention over the last two years knows EXACTLY what happened.
The word “hallucination” comes to mind.
Figure it out yet?
Someone took a shortcut in researching and/or writing the MAHA paper…something that all the generative AI companies are saying is a perfectly wonderful thing to do. After all, you won’t lose your job to AI…you will lose your job to someone who uses AI’s “help.” Until AI hallucinates and puts organic food dye-free egg whites on your face.
The continued inaccuracies in generative AI-authored writing are not limited to one political movement.
Because I knew two people (long gone) at Company X, so the company came to mind.
Who runs marketing at Company X?
Because the open position was not an executive position, I searched LinkedIn for the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, or what the cool kids call the CMO. Anyone applying for the open position would want to talk to the CMO.
But I found:
No CMO on LinkedIn.
No Head of Marketing on LinkedIn.
No marketing head on Company X’s About Us page.
CMO-less.
But they’re hiring…a marketing manager.
Normally companies hire a marketing head, then let them build out their team. But in this case, Company X is starting in the middle by hiring a non-executive marketing manager.
Or maybe not.
The CxxO and double duty
There’s a chance that one of the other executives at Company X is wearing the marketing hat, in addition to their other duties.
This isn’t unusual in small startups, after all.
CxxO.
Now this makes it difficult for people outside the company who want to speak to the marketing head.
But who cares if it’s difficult for outsiders?
Yes it makes it hard for a marketing jobseeker to determine who the hiring authority is for an open marketing position.
And yes (because this blog is all about me) it makes it difficult for a product marketing consultant to pitch their services…especially when the two original contacts have left the company.
Making it hard for outsiders is actually GOOD for the company. Pesky outsiders can be pesky, especially if they’re calling at all hours and bumping their emails.
Who runs marketing at Company U?
But what’s happening on the inside of Company X, or at Company U (your company)?
Who determines what the marketing manager is supposed to do?
Who determines if the marketing manager is a success or failure?
From the perspective of Bredemarket, I am much better off when a prospect company has a clear plan of how it can use my content-proposal-analysis services.
I’m moving in a different direction on social media. Well, personal social media anyway.
There are multiple schools of thought about whether small companies with well-known leaders should share content on their company platforms or their personal social media platforms.
On one extreme, companies only share content on company channels, to better establish the brand of WidgetCorp or whatever.
On the other extreme, company heads only share content on their personal channels because their personal connections are so important to the company’s success. In fact, these company heads may not even bother to create separate company pages.
Obviously, most companies and company heads adopt a “do both” tactic. Maybe the company head reshares company posts. Or maybe the company reshares company head posts.
Or they do something that John Bredehoft and Bredemarket have done in the past: share the same content on both the company and the personal channels.
I might not do that any more.
The experiment
The rationale behind sharing company posts on your personal channels is that your personal friends like you and will engage with your company posts.
But this rationale ignores one very pertinent fact: most of my friends have NO interest in identity, biometrics, cybersecurity, or related technologies.
Why would they engage with such content if it doesn’t interest them?
I’d share Bredemarket Facebook content to my personal Facebook feed…and with very few exceptions I’d end up with crickets.
Or I’d share some Bredemarket LinkedIn content to my personal LinkedIn account. Often…crickets.
But most painful of all was when I would share Bredemarket Instagram posts to my Instagram stories. Higher impressions then the same stories on the Bredemarket account…but absolutely no engagement. Crickets again.
So on Monday afternoon I intentionally conducted an experiment on my personal Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts, where together I have a combined 3,396 connections. My Monday afternoon identity/biometric and product marketing-related content received a total of 9 engagements…and that’s counting the Instagram user who requested “Can u share it @canadian.icon”).
Even acccounting for the three algorithms involved…that’s low.
And it…um, prompted me to ask myself a “why” question.
Why share corporate content on personal feeds?
Good question.
So for now I’m “moving in a different direction” (a few of you know where THAT phrase originated) and not bothering to share Bredemarket content on my personal feeds. At least for now.
Those who are dying to see Bredemarket content will subscribe to the appropriate Bredemarket Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn feeds.
But frankly, my friends have no need or desire to see Bredemarket content, so they won’t.
In my case, my high school friends, church friends, and even some of my former coworkers (who left the identity/biometric industry years ago) are NOT Bredemarket’s hungry people. So I’ll spare them the parade of wildebeests, wombats, and iguanas.
Product and service marketing is deceptively easy…because there’s no need to market to everyone.
I just calculated the numbers. Of the world’s population (not counting non-person entities) a generous (!) maximum of 8,000 people are hungry and interested in buying the services Bredemarket provides.
The true number is probably more like 800, but let me fantasize for a moment.
Unreal fantasy.
Or to put it another way, 99.9999% of people have absolutely no interest in Bredemarket.
But I didn’t privately contact people and gloat about my byline.
Well, with two exceptions. Because I wrote briefly (one sentence) about third-party risk management, I privately alerted two TPRM professionals who wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.
“Employ third-party risk management (TPRM) to minimize the risk when biometric data is stored with cloud providers, application partners, and companies in the supply chain.”
Pearls and ice
Other than that, I engaged in no private messaging, even to long-standing biometric professionals.
Some of the biometric professionals saw my blog or social mentions of the guest post and were duly impressed.
Others likely saw my blog or social mentions and didn’t care one bit.
The rest never saw my blog or social mentions, which meant that they didn’t actively follow Bredemarket, which again meant that they didn’t care at all.
The whole pearls before swine story plays here.
Or selling ice makers to Eskimos.
A lost cause.
Whatever example you prefer, there’s no need to market your product to those who don’t give a REDACTED about it.
I just saw an ad for one of those smartphone apps that claims to make money for you.
The normal pitch is that if you install the app today, then you can make money in the future (pay for your next coffee).
But the ad I just saw had a much more effective hook.
The woman in the ad regretted that she hadn’t installed the app two months ago, because then she would have money TODAY.
Fear of missing out (FOMO)? This woman was paying the price for ALREADY missing out. Two months of extra income gone…forever.
So naturally I wanted to adapt this “you already missed out” message to Bredemarket content creation.
But there’s a problem.
Unlike the money apps, Bredemarket does not promise that its content will deliver sales to identity, biometrics, and technology firms this month.
In fact, it may take up to 17 months for my content to generate sales.
“It takes longer than three days for content marketing to yield results. One source estimates four to five months. Another source says six to twelve months. Joe Pulizzi (quoted by Neil Patel) estimates 15 to 17 months. And all the sources say that their estimates may not apply to your particular case.”
But…
…What if you were around back in June 2023 when I revived Bredemarket?
“Problem-solving is what you do when you don’t know how to solve a problem.”
She contrasts this with solving problems, where you apply known techniques to a problem that has already been solved.
Marchetti approaches this from an education perspective, where students ideally learn solving problems AND problem-solving.
Shah SP and P-S
This distinction is not unique to Marchetti’s anonymous speaker. Sam J. Shah, also dealing with students, notes the need for problem-solving in certain scientific disciplines:
“[M]ost of the work done in fields as sterile as combinatorics or as messy as molecular biology involves navigating corridors of inquiry, trying (and often failing) to draw connections, and coming up with new lenses with which to look at problems. Frustration and dead ends are part and parcel of working in these fields.”
Bredemarket SP and P-S
We encounter these issues outside of school when we go to work.
For businesses, Bredemarket usually solves problems: your prospects don’t know about you, your prospects don’t know why they should care about you, your prospects lack information. There are known solutions.
Occasionally, Bredemarket engages in problem-solving, where there are questions without clear answers, and you and I work together to determine how to move forward.
Your company probably needs to both solve tactical problems and perform strategic problem-solving.
I am clearly not the Form I-9 expert—see Janice Kephart and her company ZipID for the full understanding. But this introduces why we have the U.S. Form I-9, how it keeps employers and employees within the law, and what it can do to stop North Koreans from robbing companies blind.
Why
Someone can’t just waltz into a U.S. employer and start working. Legally, anyway.
While there are numerous requirements that you have to meet before starting a job, the one that concerns us here is that only certain people are legally authorized to work.
To check this is a two part process:
To check the identity of the person.
To check the employment authorization of the person.
Both are necessary. It does no good to determine that Sam Smith is authorized if Sam Smith is really Kim Jong Spy.
Now you don’t have to be a U.S. citizen to work here. I’ve worked with a number of green card holders from France and other countries. I’ve worked with a number of temporary visa holders in which the visa permits the person to work for pay.
But student visa holders usually can’t work.
And people who are just visiting the country usually can’t work.
And finally, people who slip across the border can’t work.
How
So how do we make sure that people who work here are identified and authorized?
“Use Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to verify the identity and employment authorization of individuals hired for employment in the United States. All U.S. employers must properly complete Form I-9 for every individual they hire for employment in the United States. This includes citizens and aliens. Both employees and employers (or authorized representatives of the employer) must complete the form.”
The employee starts the ball rolling by proving that they are who they say they are, and that they are authorized to work here. To do this, they provide information and documents, including at least some of the following:
Full name
Address
Date of birth
Social Security Number (not a Taxpayer Identification Number)
U. S. citizenship or immigration status (there are multiple options here, ranging from U.S. citizen to “alien authorized to work”)
Other numbers as necessary, such as a USCIS number
One or more of “List A,” “List B,” and/or “List C” documents
The most powerful of the acceptable documents are List A documents, which prove both identity and employment authorization. A U.S. Passport or a Permanent Resident Card are the most common documents here, but if you have a passport from the Federated States of Micronesia you may still be good to go.
Passport, Federated States of Micronesia. Blagomeni • CC BY-SA 3.0. Source.
If you don’t have a List A document, then you need one List B (identity) and one List C (authorization) document.
List B includes driver’s licenses (REAL ID or no, even Canadian), school ID cards, voter IDs, tribal documents, and others that establish identity in some way.
List C includes Social Security cards, birth certificates, and other authorization documents.
After the employee provides all this and completes Section 1 of Form I-9, the employer checks it and completes Section 2 of the form. The documentation must “reasonably” appear to be genuine.
What
But…if this whole system relies on the employer saying “looks good to me,” how does this keep Kim Jong Spy from illegally working at Palantir and stealing state secrets and American technology?
One, the information and the document checks are worth something. While an employer is unable to truly verify that a driver’s license or a passport is not fraudulent—especially if the remote employee never visits the employer in person—you can bet that USCIS checks all those numbers, and if 10 people use the same Social Security Number they will be flagged.
Two, employers that repeatedly flaunt U.S. employment law can get in trouble. As I detailed in a LinkedIn post, this could include five years of prison time.
So that’s a powerful disincentive for unintentionally or intentionally hiring Kim Jong Spy.
And if the Form I-9 seems like a lot of work, and you wish you could automate it…see ZipID. In addition to everything else, it can compare a live face with the submitted photo ID…because.
Bredemarket 