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External content creators, part three: accountability

Part of a series (which started here) on why companies are reluctant to use external content creators, and how to mitigate those companies’ concerns.

The concern

In his article, “The Truth About Trusting External Content Partners,” Skyword CEO Andrew Wheeler highlighted this concern:

We’ll lose accountability and quality control

By GeorgeLouis at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32926303

Think about this from the perspective of the company. Often (but not always) companies consider using external help because they are overloaded with work. (There’s another reason to use external help, which I’ll address in the fourth post in this series.) The boss is already having a tough enough time getting the worker bees to generate quality content in such a high-pressure situation. The boss is going to be really concerned about some outsider, not under the boss’ thumb. How will the boss control the outsider?

Many bosses are not like this, but even the most enlightened ones will have a concern about how an outsider that they don’t know is going to meet the quality standards of the employees that they do know.

What Andrew Wheeler said

When addressing this concern, Wheeler starts out by presenting an uncomfortable truth.

I’ve found this concern usually resonates with teams for whom process and quality control are already sore spots. Either no content creation infrastructure exists, the current structure is too rigid to scale, or the structure is chaotic and there’s fear that an external partner will exacerbate the problem.
From https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/the-truth-about-trusting-external-content-partners/

Because Skyword is in the business of connecting freelancers with companies needing their services, one of the things that Skyword does is to institute its own process to ensure the maintenance of accountability and quality control. Wheeler’s article describes four key elements that any process should include: documented guidelines, good briefs, dedicated gatekeepers, and good content management technology.

What I say

Every project has a process. Perhaps the process may be chaotic, but it’s a process. It’s better to institute a good one. When Bredemarket takes on a project, there are three ways to implement a process.

If I am sent out to a project by a service such as Skyword, SMA, or Dragonfly Editorial, often the service does what Skyword does and institutes its own process.
There are some cases in which the client has a mature process, and in that case I just slot myself into the client’s existing process.
In other cases, most notably with very small companies, I institute a process myself. When used, my content creation process has a simple order of steps, starting with the kickoff described in a prior post in this series.

Regardless of where the process comes from, the goal is the same: to institute accountability and quality control over the final product.

We’re almost to the finish line. We have one more concern to address: It’s faster/easier to just do it ourselves.

External content creators, part two: branding

If you missed the first post in this series, I’m looking at four concerns that companies may have about contracting with external content creators. These four concerns were identified by Andrew Wheeler, CEO of Skyword, who addressed each one in turn.

In this post series, I will augment Wheeler’s responses with some thoughts of my own.

The concern

The second concern Andrew Wheeler raised in his article was the following:

They’ll never “get” our brand like we do

This differs from expertise. It’s one thing to have the expertise that a company needs. It’s another thing to know how companies do things.

I’ll choose an example well outside of my areas of expertise to make the point. Specifically, I’ll talk about insurance companies.

Would someone explain to me why multiple insurance companies choose to air ads in which the spokespeople are intentionally annoying? There’s one company that makes a big point about how annoying its white-clothed female spokesperson is. Another insurance company has a spokesperson referred to as “mayhem.” And then there’s the company that used to feature the performing voice of Gilbert Gottfried; if you are not familiar with his voice, it’s not smooth and calming.

Other insurance companies have adopted an older, more traditional branding approach that hearkens back to Allstate’s old “you’re in good hands” or State Farm’s “like a good neighbor.” New York Life still maintains this more soothing approach.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMaQetarGsY

What if an external content creator approached a company with the wrong branding tone? “Your lifestyle commercial is BORING. Here’s my pitch for an ad with an emu and a gecko who are seriously injured in a major automobile accident!”

That pitch meeting wouldn’t end well.

What Andrew Wheeler said

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Making sure a partner is well-versed in your brand is both a process and a two-way street.
From https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/the-truth-about-trusting-external-content-partners/

It’s a two-way street because the company has to communicate to the freelancer its branding standards, while the freelancer has to research the company to get a feel for how the company communicates.

What I say

So how do you make sure this required communication happens?

By allocating time for it at the beginning of the project.

On occasion I’ve described the process that Bredemarket uses when kicking off a project with its clients. I start by providing a high-level overview.

Bredemarket’s content creation process ensures that the final written content (a) advances your GOAL, (b) communicates your BENEFITS, and (c) speaks to your TARGET AUDIENCE. It is both iterative and collaborative.
From https://bredemarket.com/2021/08/04/revising-bredemarkets-content-creation-process/

When I drill down into the content creation process itself, here is how I describe the kickoff meeting with the client.

You and Bredemarket agree upon the topic, goal, benefits, and target audience (and, if necessary, outline, section sub-goals, relevant examples, and relevant key words/hashtags, and interim and final due dates).
From https://bredemarket.com/2021/08/04/revising-bredemarkets-content-creation-process/

Agreement upon the branding strategy can fall into this initial discussion, perhaps when talking about the goal of the content. If the goal is to gently reassure potential clients that the service will ease their burdens, then the content will take one approach. If the goal is to shock and amuse potential clients with a stronger call to action, then you’ll use the mayhem guy.

Regardless of your process, it’s important to communicate and reach agreement on the critical things at the beginning of the project. This saves expensive rework later in the project.

Time to move on to the third concern, “we’ll lose accountability and quality control.“

External content creators, part one: expertise

After reading a SideHusl recommendation for suggested work for nomads (even though I’m not a nomad), I signed up with yet another external referral service, Skyword. My Skyword profile is here, by the way.

After getting everything set up, I explored the company more deeply, and ran across this article by Skyword CEO Andrew Wheeler entitled “The Truth About Trusting External Content Partners.” The article addresses the reluctance of companies to trust outsiders to create their content. Wheeler cataloged four concerns and addressed them one by one.

As I read Wheeler’s article, three thoughts came to mind.

I have things to say myself about each of these four concerns.
Hmm…four-post series. Because the four-post series last week wasn’t enough.
And then I can add the series to my Skyword portfolio.

So, let’s dig in. I’ll summarize the concern that a company may have with using an external content creator, look at how Andrew Wheeler addressed the concern, and then add a few thoughts of my own.

The concern

The first concern Andrew Wheeler raised in his article was the following:

The content won’t be in-depth or expert enough for our audience

From the perspective of the company, they’ve spent years or decades acquiring the expertise in question. What happens if they bring someone off the street who can spell “AFIS,” but has no idea what it is?

What Andrew Wheeler said

Wheeler addressed this concern by noting that there are a lot of people out there who have the expertise that a company needs. This is but a small part of what Wheeler said; read the rest here.

The reason we believe in tapping into freelance creators for content, rather than agencies or insourcing, is that the talent pool is so large it’s guaranteed that people with the skills you’re looking for are out there.
From https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/the-truth-about-trusting-external-content-partners/

As part of the process of signing up with Skywords as a freelancer, you are asked to go into detail about your specific expertise: identifying the types of expertise that you possess, and where you acquired that expertise.

What I say

From the freelancing perspective, it is incumbent on the freelancer to identify the specific expertise they can provide.

I won’t link to the specific conversations, but I’ve seen social media posts from aspiring freelance writers saying, “Hey, I can write stuff.” When pressed for details, they often respond, “Oh, I can write anything.” No wonder companies get jittery about using freelancers.

If you’ve read any of my stuff, you know that I have identified some specific areas of expertise that I provide. You know, the biometric content marketing expert and biometric proposal writing expert stuff. Although I’m certainly willing to expand beyond these core markets (see my first goal for 2022), I realize that my best chances at writing are with companies in the biometric/identity space.

In fact, my issue is the inverse of the company issue. While companies are looking for freelancers with relevant expertise, I am looking for companies that can use my relevant expertise. There are obviously a number of biometric/identity companies out there, some of which have used Bredemarket, others of which have not used Bredemarket.

Why isn’t EVERY biometric/identity company using Bredemarket?

Well, the concern about expertise is only the first concern. There are three others that must be addressed:

Alaska HB389 does NOT repeal REAL ID. But it has a “foreign ownership” clause.

The title of Alaska HB389, introduced last month, sounds grandiose:

“An Act repealing the implementation of the federal REAL ID Act of 2005; relating to identification cards; relating to drivers’ licenses; and providing for an effective date.”

Does HB389 prevent Alaska from issuing REAL IDs?

When you read the title of the bill, alarms go off in your head.

If the title is true, it’s a true setback. After many years, the entire country (perhaps minus a territory or two) has finally gotten on board with REAL ID in advance of the due date, and now one of the states is pulling out.

Except that when you read the detail of the bill (at least as originally written; it could change in committee), it doesn’t repeal Alaska’s compliance of REAL ID.

As Chris Burt notes in a Biometric Updatre post, it only provides an option for the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles to issue an identification card that is non-REAL ID compliant. This is not different from any other state (for example, California) that issues non-REAL ID cards that are “not for federal purposes” or “not for federal identification” or “federal limits apply.”

From https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification-cards/real-id/what-is-real-id/

So Alaskans, don’t panic. If you want to get a REAL ID to board a plane, you can still do this. Note the [BRACKETED ALL CAPS] text in Section 1 of HB389 as originally written, illustrated below.

From https://legiscan.com/AK/text/HB389/id/2525192

So Alaska can still issue “federally compliant” (i.e., REAL ID) driver’s licenses.

But what about foreign ownership?

But as long as I was reading the text of the bill, I thought I’d see what else it proposed to change, and ran across this text in Section 4.

Now THAT caught my eye. (Alaska Statutes Chapter 15 is the portion of the statutes that governs driver’s licenses in general, so this clause affects EVERYTHING.)

If your company is 94% U.S.-owned, that’s not good enough in Alaska.

(Well, at least until Putin decides that Edouard de Stoeckl’s 1867 sale of Alaska was illegal…)

The signing of the Alaska Treaty of Cessation on March 30, 1867. Left to right: Robert S. Chew, William H. Seward, William Hunter, Mr. Bodisco, Eduard de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner, and Frederick W. Seward. By Emanuel Leutze (d. 1868) – http://www.akhistorycourse.org/articles/article.php?artID=202, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4246381

Most if not all U.S. state agencies do not produce driver’s licenses themselves, but instead contract with private companies to do the work. These private companies either produce the licenses at state agency offices, or produce them as a service (DLaaS) at a secure production center (which may produce licenses for multiple states). To my knowledge, all of the production centers for U.S. driver’s licenses are located within the United States.

But who are the “private entities” that provide driver’s license manufacturing services? Let’s look at the major ones and see if they’re affected by Section 4 of the draft of Alaska HB389.

IDEMIA

It is a matter of public record that the majority of U.S. states use IDEMIA to produce their driver’s licenses, either within agency offices or in secure IDEMIA production centers. When I was an employee of IDEMIA, I did not have the necessary security clearance to enter any of these production centers. Employees should only have the security permissions that they need, and my job had no need for me to access the PII of IDEMIA’s driver’s license customers, or to enter the facilities in which these secure documents are manufactured. There are security requirements governing this.

…our state-of-the-art central issuance facilities…are highly secure and meet North American Security Products Organization (NASPO) Level I security requirements.
From https://na.idemia.com/dmv/physical-drivers-licenses-and-id-cards/

We’ll return to NASPO later in this post.

As I’ve noted before, IDEMIA is (currently) majority owned by Advent International, a U.S. based investment firm. IDEMIA entered the U.S. driver’s license market by acquiring Morpho (French), which had previously acquired MorphoTrust/L-1 Identity Solutions (U.S.), which had previously acquired Digimarc’s ID Systems business (also U.S.).

And, as I’ve noted, Advent International will probably choose to sell IDEMIA at some point in the future.

However, Advent International is not the exclusive owner of IDEMIA, because part of the company is owned by Bpifrance, which is (drumroll) French.

From https://www.bpifrance.com/why-france

Alaska’s HB389, if passed in its original form, would prohibit the state from “communicating” personally identifying information (PII) to a private entity with more than five percent foreign ownership. I do not know the percentage that Bpifrance owns (all of the press releases failed to include that little tidbit), so I don’t know if IDEMIA would run afoul of the law or not.

HB389, if unmodified, is just one thing that any company that purchases IDEMIA must keep in mind.

IDEMIA doesn’t produce Alaska driver’s licenses. Who does?

But that doesn’t matter, because IDEMIA isn’t the Alaska driver’s license vendor anyway. That contract is controlled by another company.

Austin, TX – October 31, 2018 – Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 GTO), and Alaska’s Division of Motor Vehicles will continue their work of providing credentials to citizens with the additional goal of helping the state become Real ID compliant by increasing security of the state’s driver’s license and identification cards.
From https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/markets/digital-identity-and-security/government/press-release/alaska-extends-contract-with-gemalto-to-enhance-drivers-license-security

Gemalto (a Dutch company) was subsequently acquired by Thales, which is a French company. Gemalto entered the U.S. driver’s license market when it acquired Marquis ID Systems.

Now I do not know the details of Alaska’s contract with Thales, but it stands to reason that if Thales is “providing credentials to citizens” (implying a service bureau relationship), then at some point the state is going to have to “convey, distribute, or communicate” PII to Thales.

Other vendors

But don’t worry. IDEMIA and Thales are not the only driver’s license manufacturers out there, so you don’t have to worry about foreigners getting your data. Just select an American company!

For example, Veridos can provide driver’s licenses. Veridos is a joint venture between Giesecke+Devrient and Bundesdruckerei…whoops, that’s not a U.S. company.

And there’s another driver’s license manufacturer out there. It’s called…Canadian Bank Note.

There’s also Valid, which is…Brazilian.

Let’s look at NASPO

Despite the fact that these entities are foreign-owned, all of them (either on their own, or through parents or acquired companies) are members of NASPO, and many of them have NASPO certification.

So what?

NASPO international was formed as the North American Security Products Organization. The non-profit organization was founded in 2002 by companies and individuals in industry that recognized the need for security focused standards to prevent fraudulent acts that support criminal and terrorist activity….

NASPO INTERNATIONAL was formed to combat the ever increasing amount of fraud within the areas of brand protection, document security, and identity. Our focus is to produce credible, structured, and, when appropriate, certifiable standards. NASPO INTERNATIONAL has created a risk reduction standard and auditing process to certify security focused organizations. This structure also provides the end user with the ability to create a secure supply chain from supplier to end users.
From https://naspo.info/about-us/faq/

From my point of view, NASPO tries to achieve what HB389 clumsily tries to achieve by its “minimal foreign ownership” clause. 100% U.S. ownership does not guarantee the security of your data, and 94% U.S. ownership does not guarantee that your data will wind up in a foreign capital.

So what happens next?

I have no idea whether HB389 will get passed, but unless it is substantially amended, Alaskans can still get REAL ID driver’s licenses so that they can board planes, enter secure federal facilities, and the like without getting a passport or other authorized document.

But I’m not sure what’s going to happen regarding the foreign ownership clause. Maybe people at some of the firms listed above are already looking into this.

But if my assumptions on HB389 are correct, and it passes with Section 4 intact, perhaps Alaska may not be able to rely on a private entity to provide driver’s licenses as a service (DLaaS). In that case, the state will have to produce its own driver’s licenses, free from foreign influence.

By Jerome Svigals, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20149452

On corporate identity (not personal identity)

I was checking on Bredemarket’s appearance in various searches (have I told you that I am a biometric proposal writing expert?), and I ran across something having to do with proposals and identity that was outside of my usual definition of “identity.”

This article talked about writing a proposal to help a company establish its corporate identity.

(Yes, I know a corporation is a person, but this is something different. I can’t capture IBM’s face, and Wendy’s face is not necessarily a unique biometric identifier.)

Establishing an outward-facing corporate identity

In the article, Ruben described how to help a company establish its corporate identity. After suggesting that you ensure that you understand the company, Ruben focused on the company’s needs.

Identify the Needs – having described the company, the next step is to explain why your idea for a logo or marketing campaign is suitable for their goals. There may be many “needs” you need to address. For example, it might be a good idea to describe why rebranding can make a company look more modern and approachable.

From there, you would naturally describe how you would meet the company’s needs, and why you are qualified to meet the company’s needs.

If all goes well, the company will contract with you, then you will come up with a plan to optimize the company’s corporate identity. The company will implement the plan, the company’s revenue will increase, and you will be a hero.

But corporate identity goes beyond the logo, the website, and the marketing materials.

Establishing a strategic corporate identity

There’s an important step that a company needs to take before making decisions on outward-facing marketing.

The company has to decide who it is.

There are a multitude of ways to do this, ranging from a detailed business plan to a brief mission statement or statement of purpose. Regardless of the avenue you take, you need to know what you want to do.

Take an example from the 1980s. Perhaps some of you may remember Mita, famous for the advertising slogan “all we make are great copiers.”

There was a reason that Mita used that slogan:

If you are sixth in unit sales in the office copier industry and you are one of the few manufacturers that does not have a diversified product line, then the thing to do in your advertising is disparage diversification.
From https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/02/business/advertising-mita-copier-campaign-has-a-single-theme.html

In this case, the advertising slogan helped shape the entire strategy of the company, resulting in a corporate identity that was very successful.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkNbEoFHCtc

Revising a strategic corporate identity

In fact, it was too successful. Because if you already make great copiers, what else do you need to do? Not much, I guess.

But early in the 1990s, it started making mistakes: relocating factories in expensive Hong Kong, letting management become bloated and backsliding on technology. At the same time, Fuji-Xerox, Ricoh and Konica stepped up their presence. Among other things, Mita failed to embrace digital technologies.
From https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-aug-13-fi-12663-story.html

See Kodak.

Mita eventually went bankrupt and was acquired by Kyocera, who immediately decided to work on Mita’s corporate identity. The company was rebranded as Kyocera Mita Corporation in 2000, and was re-rebranded as Kyocera Document Solutions in 2012. Mita schmeeta.

In today’s business world, digitalization is proceeding at an unprecedented pace and the volume of documents is growing exponentially.
In this business environment, we believe that our mission is to support our customers to effectively manage their information, and turn that information into knowledge, in order to address their challenges with a sense of speed.
From https://www.kyoceradocumentsolutions.com/company/greeting.html

You can see how the corporate identity has evolved over the decades, and how a company that once concentrated on taking pieces of paper and making identical pieces of paper now aspires to transform document information into knowledge to address challenges.

What does this mean for your corporate identity?

As I’ve noted, establishment of a marketing corporate identity is only part of an overall strategic plan to guide the future direction of a company.

Taking Bredemarket as an example, the corporate identity established by my logo is only a part of the plan guiding Bredemarket.

The pencil symbolizes writing, and long experience in writing, but it does not say WHAT Bredemarket writes. That has been established, revised, and expanded, partially through the annual goals that I set.

As long as I don’t blow it and get too restrictive (Bredemarket: all we write are fingerprint RFP responses), I should be fine.

Why I find “race recognition” problematic

Let me start by admitting to my, um, bias.

For the last twenty-five plus years, I have been involved in the identification of individuals.

Who is the person who is going through the arrest/booking process?
Who is the person who claims to be entitled to welfare benefits?
Who is the person who wants to enter the country?
Who is the person who is exiting the country? (Yes, I remember the visa overstay issue.)
Who is the person who wants to enter the computer room in the office building?
Who is the person who is applying for a driver’s license or passport?
Who is the person who wants to enter the sports stadium or concert arena?

These are just a few of the problems that I have worked on solving over the last twenty-five plus years, all of which are tied to individual identity.

From that perspective, I really don’t care if the person entering the stadium/computer room/country whatever is female, mixed race, Muslim, left handed, or whatever. I just want to know if this is the individual that he/she/they claims to be.

If you’ve never seen the list of potential candidates generated by a top-tier facial recognition program, you may be shocked when you see it. That list of candidates may include white men, Asian women, and everything in between. “Well, that’s wrong,” you may say to yourself. “How can the results include people of multiple races and genders?” It’s because the algorithm doesn’t care about race and gender. Think about it – what if a victim THINKS that he was attacked by a white male, but the attacker was really an Asian female? Identify the individual, not the race or gender.

From http://gendershades.org/. Yes, http.

So when Gender Shades came out, stating that IBM, Microsoft, and Face++ AI services had problems recognizing the gender of people, especially those with darker skin, my reaction was “so what”?

(Note that this is a different question than the question of how an algorithm identifies individuals of different genders, races, and ages, which has been addressed by NIST.)

But some people persist in addressing biometrics’ “failure” to properly identify genders and races, ignoring the fact that both gender and race have become social rather than biological constructs. Is the Olympian Jenner male, female, or something else? What are your personal pronouns? What happens when a mixed race person identifies with one race rather than another? And aren’t we all mixed race anyway?

The latest study from AlBdairi et al on computational methods for ethnicity identification

But there’s still a great interest in “race recognition.”

As Jim Nash of Biometric Update notes, a team of scientists has published an open access paper entitled “Face Recognition Based on Deep Learning and FPGA for Ethnicity Identification.”

From https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/5/2605/htm

The authors claim that their study is “the first image collection gathered specifically to address the ethnicity identification problem.”

But what of the NIST demographic study cited above? you may ask. The NIST study did NOT have the races of the individuals, but used the individuals’ country of origin as a proxy for race. Then again, it is possible that this study may have done the same thing.

Despite the fact that there are several large-scale face image databases accessible online, none of these databases are acceptable for the purpose of the conducted study in our research. Furthermore, 3141 photographs were gathered from a variety of sources. Specifically, 1081, 1021, and 1039 Chinese, Pakistani, and Russian face photos were gathered, respectively.
From https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/5/2605/htm

There was no mention of whether any of the Chinese face photos were Caucasian…or how the researchers could tell that they were Caucasian.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the science behind using Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) models and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to identify ethnicity, read the paper. Or skip to the results.

The experimental results reported that our model outperformed all the methods of state-of-the-art, achieving an accuracy and F1 score value of 96.9 percent and 94.6 percent, respectively.
From https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/5/2605/htm

But this doesn’t answer the question I raised earlier.

Three possible use cases for race recognition, two of which are problematic

Why would anyone want to identify ethnicity or engage in race recognition? Jim Nash of Biometric Update summarizes three possible use cases for doing this, which I will address one by one. TL;DR two of the use cases are problematic.

The code…could find a role in the growing field of race-targeted medical treatments and pharmacogenomics, where accurately ascertaining race could provide better care.
From https://www.biometricupdate.com/202203/identifying-ethnicity-problematic-so-scientists-write-race-recognition-code

Note that in this case race IS a biological construct, so perhaps its use is valid here. Regardless of how Nkechi Amare Diallo (formerly Rachel Dolezal) self-identifies, she’s not a targeted candidate for sickle cell treatment.

It could be helpful to some employers. Such as system could “use racial information to offer employers ethnically convenient services, then preventing the offending risk present in many cultural taboos.”
From https://www.biometricupdate.com/202203/identifying-ethnicity-problematic-so-scientists-write-race-recognition-code

This is where things start to get problematic. Using Diallo as an example, race recognition software based upon her biological race would see no problem in offering her fried chicken and watermelon at a corporate function, but Diallo might have some different feelings about this. And it’s not guaranteed that ALL members of a particular race are affected by particular cultural taboos. (The text below, from 1965, was slightly edited.)

Godfrey Cambridge. Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0131387/

People used to think of (blacks) as going around with fried chicken in a paper bag, (Godfrey) Cambridge says. But things have changed. “Now,” he says, “we carry an attache case—with fried chicken in it. We ain’t going to give up everything just to get along with you people.”
From http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,839260,00.html. Yes, http.

While some employees may be pleased that they receive a particular type of treatment because of their biological race, others may not be pleased at all.

So let’s move on to Nash’s third use case for race recognition. Hold on to your seats.

Ultimately, however, the broadest potential mission for race recognition would be in security — at border stations and deployed in public-access areas, according to the report.
From https://www.biometricupdate.com/202203/identifying-ethnicity-problematic-so-scientists-write-race-recognition-code

I thought we had settled this over 20 years ago. Although we really didn’t.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rkmIAnfDVY

While President Bush was primarily speaking about religious affiliation, he also made the point that we should not judge individuals based upon the color of their skin.

Yet we do.

If I may again return to our current sad reality, there have been allegations that Africans encountered segregation and substandard treatment when trying to flee Ukraine. (When speaking of “African,” note that concerns were raised by officials from Gabon, Ghana, and Kenya – not from Egypt, Libya, or Tunisia. Then again, Indian students also complained of substandard treatment.)

Many people in the United States and western Europe would find it totally unacceptable to treat people at borders and public areas differently by race.

Do we want to encourage this use case?

And if you feel that we should, please provide your picture. I want to see if your concerns are worthy of consideration.

How to reach Bredemarket via Volley

So I returned to something that I started over a year ago. It’s something that allowed me to preach (again) how asynchronous communications can be wonderful.

By Plugwash at en.wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8453185

The benefits of asynchronous communication

Wednesday night’s OC SPARK meeting was devoted to navigating business problems during a pandemic, or during any other time. One of the issues raised was the need to save time. Specifically: how do you get project start information from potential clients as quickly as possible so that you can start creating a solution for them? (In other words, how do you move forward to billable time?)

I like to meet with my potential clients to discuss their needs. Those meetings usually go well; an agenda helps, and I have a handy-dandy form that helps me capture the client’s needs as quickly as possible.

But there are times when client meetings do not go as smoothly. In those cases, the client may spend hours and hours explaining what they want, which takes time.

But what if the client communications were pre-recorded, so that rather than sitting in a meeting to listen to them, you could listen to then whenever you wanted?

And what if those recordings allowed playback at faster speeds, and moving forward and back through the recording? If you can do this, then a 30 minute recording can be consumed much more quickly.

And if you could then record your response, which the client could again listen to at any time (at any speed, skipping the boring parts), you could both benefit from this.

Now there ARE times when you both need to be talking to each other at the same time. Weddings come to mind. You don’t want one party to say “I do” and have to wait hours or days for the other party to say “I do” also. (Although proxy marriages can be an option when one of the couple is in the military and deployed. But I digress.)

But in many instances, asynchronous communication is more effective and fits the bill.

The Volley App solution

Some time ago, I downloaded the Volley App after it was released.

Volley includes the features that I listed above: asynchronous communication, playback at multiple speeds, and the ability to move forward and backward in the pre-recorded video.

Of course, one thing about using the Volley app is that the other person needs to have some level of access to Volley. This is understandable; in 1921 if you had a phone but your brother didn’t, you weren’t going to be able to call your brother on the phone.

And since I didn’t know anyone else who used Volley (other than the “Hello Volley” people), I never really used it for any consequential purpose.

So here’s how you can contact me on Volley

Going back to the OC SPARK meeting, I mentioned the Volley app as a possible time-saving solution via its asynchronous communication feature. This prompted me to revisit my own Volley account and figure out how Volley users could contact me.

They can do so via the URL talk.volley.app/bredemarket. (Ah, another page not visited by TinEye.)

From https://talk.volley.app/bredemarket

In the picture above, you can see that big button that says “Talk to John on Volley.”

But there’s a catch.

You have to set up a Volley account first.

I didn’t go through the setup process since I already have a Volley account, but it looks like people with existing Google and LinkedIn accounts can speed the account setup process.

Of course, if you already have a Volley account, you don’t need to create one.

So either way, if you want to send me a Volley, feel free to go to https://talk.volley.app/bredemarket to do so.

And I’ll respond.

When I have time.

I may be a fraudster!

I’ve previously contacted a journalist via Help a Reporter Out (HARO), and I occasionally pitch to journalists on the service. In fact, I submitted a new pitch earlier this month.

So I noted with interest this story of how fraudsters fool Help a Reporter Out pitch recipients with synthetic or otherwise fraudulent identities.

When a reporter is writing a story that requires a source that he or she does not have, that reporter will likely turn to HARO, a service that “connects journalists seeking expertise to include in their content with sources who have that expertise.”…
Now, shady SEOs hide behind fake photos and personalities. The latest black hat search-engine optimization trend is to respond to Help-a-Reporter-Out (HARO) inquiries pretending to be a person of whichever gender/ethnicity the journalist is seeking comment from.
From https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/deepfakes-are-ruining-the-internet

As it turns out, I have never responded to a pitch that specifically requested comments from white males. (Probably because if a pitch DOESN’T request gender/ethnicity information, chances are that the respondent will be a white male.) But it’s clear how a HARO pitch scammer could create a synthesized identity of a biometric proposal writing expert.

So if you’re asking your source for a picture, John W. Defeo suggests that you ask for TWO pictures. I think that the technical term for this is MPA, or Multi Photo Authentication.

There’s one other suggestion.

Take those photographs and plug them into a reverse image lookup service like Tineye (or even Google Images). Have they appeared on the web before? Does the context make sense?
From https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/deepfakes-are-ruining-the-internet

I often use the picture that is found on my jebredcal Twitter profile.

So I plugged that in to a Google reverse image search. As expected, it hit on Twitter, but also hit on some other social media platforms such as LinkedIn.

I hadn’t heard of TinEye before, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Here’s what TinEye found:

Very odd, since as I previously mentioned this particular image is available on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other sources. But it turns out that TinEye honors requests from social media services NOT to crawl their sites. (No comment.) And TinEye apparently hasn’t crawled the relevant page on bredemarket.com yet.

Which leads to the scary thought – what if someone searched TinEye for me, and didn’t bother to search anywhere else after getting 0 results? Would the searcher conclude that I was a synthetically-generated biobot?

Wow, talk about identity concerns…

“Who Are You” by The Who. Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11316153

Bredemarket and proposals, part four: other services

So I’ve been going through my list of red bullets from this graphic.

Excerpt from https://bredemarket.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/bmtprop-20220221a.pdf

I decided to write posts on some of the red bullets to explain the types of services that Bredemarket offers.

The first post described Bredemarket’s RFx response services.
The second described Bredemarket’s sole source response services.
The third described Bredemarket’s proposal template services.

Which brought me to the fourth bullet, which was a fairly interesting project.

The technical leave behind project

This particular project was an unusual one, for two reasons.

First, there were four companies involved:

Bredemarket.
The company that contracted Bredemarket.
The company that contracted the company that contracted Bredemarket.
The final customer.

Despite all of the layers on this particular project, the people from all four companies worked well together and got the job done.

The second unusual thing about this particular project was that although it was not a proposal project per se, it required proposal expertise.

While I can’t go into details, I can briefly say that the goal of the project was to provide “technical leave behinds” for the final customer. The customer was a consulting firm with significant technical expertise in a particular vendor’s product family. When the customer visited one of its clients, it wanted to leave its client with one or more of these technical leave behinds, each of which was devoted to one of the many products in the product family.

So while these technical leave behinds were not proposals themselves, and on first glance appear to be more along the lines of Bredemarket’s content marketing work, they fulfilled a proposal-like purpose by providing information that the client could subsequently use to request information or a proposal from the consulting firm.

Because of this, the technical leave behinds had to be customer centric and respond to specific needs that customers may have. Maybe not to the specific level of detail that would satisfy 100% of any one customer’s specific needs, but the leave behinds at least had to address some major needs in template form.

So what?

Those of you who have read my writing on benefits knew that this question was coming.

“So Bredemarket can author technical leave behinds. So what?”

The benefit to you is that Bredemarket can work with you to create text to meet any of your needs, even if it doesn’t fit into some nice neat category such as a sole source proposal or an RFP response or a case study or a white paper or a blog post. For example, over the years I’ve not only created technical leave behinds, but I’ve also created and/or maintained trade show demonstration scripts, brief company analyses, customer and competitor installation lists, internal information services, external information services (including dedicated LinkedIn and Facebook pages devoted to particular topics), website and social media analyses, and a myriad of other pieces of written content.

If you need any type of written content that can help your company connect with other companies, let me know and I’ll work with you to create that content.

Send me an email at john.bredehoft@bredemarket.com.
Or go to calendly.com/bredemarket to book a meeting with me.
Or go to bredemarket.com/contact/ to use my contact form.

OK, now I’m done with expanding on the red bullets. There’s no point in expanding on the fifth bullet, “Additional proposal work for Bredemarket itself,” because that service is of no benefit to you. It only benefits me. Similarly, my MorphoTrak and Printrak proposal work won’t benefit you, unless you work for IDEMIA and are making money off of my prior work.

Again, if you missed any posts in the series, be sure to visit parts one, two, and three. And let me know if I can help you.

Bredemarket and proposals, part three: proposal templates

This is the third installment in my post series about the proposal services that Bredemarket provides to its clients. If you missed them, be sure to read part one about Bredemarket’s RFx response services, and part two about Bredemarket’s sole source response services.

We’re moving through the red bullets in my projects list. Let’s continue.

The need for proposal template services

Often when a company first writes a proposal, the entire thing is written from scratch by a bunch of proposal writers, subject matter experts (SMEs), and executives, and after some extraordinary effort, the proposal goes out the door.

Then the time comes to write a second proposal. “Let’s start with the text from the first one,” everybody says, and the second proposal goes out the door (hopefully with less effort).

This borrowing from other proposals continues, except when it doesn’t. At some point, someone is going to say, “All of these previous proposals are terrible, so I’m going to write my own.”

After a few years, the company has a collection of proposals…and quite possibly a host of problems. Here are a few things that could happen:

The proposals include inconsistent information. Some say that the company’s solution is supported on Windows 11, others say it’s supported on Windows 10 and 11, and there’s an old proposal that says the company’s solution is supported on Windows 7. Unfortuately, that latter proposal may be the one that someone borrows to write a new proposal, with disastrous results.
The proposals include even more inconsistent information. Maybe some proposals say the product name is GreenWidget. Others say it’s Green Widget. Others say it’s WidgetCo’s GreenWidget. Others say it’s GreenWidget by WidgetCo, Inc. And heaven help you if WidgetCo was acquired by BigMegaCorp.
The proposals include downright incorrect information. Maybe half of the proposals that you’ve issued over the years talk about how GreenWidget operates on both 110 volts and 220 volts. An engineer, reading the proposal that you submitted to the customer yesterday, says to you, “Oh, we discontinued 220 volt support last year.” Oops.

So how do you not only prevent these inconsistencies and mistakes from happening, but ensure that everyone is conveying the same message?

First, you create a proposal template, proposal library, proposal boilerplate, or whatever you want to call it that includes a standard set of text to use in every future proposal (RFx response or sole source letter). This text is reviewed by subject matter experts, executives, and others to ensure that it is correct.

Second, you review this text on a regular basis to make sure that it is up to date, and references to old operating systems and sunsetted features are removed so that they don’t slip into future proposals.

My experience with proposal templates

My personal experience with templates dates back over twenty years, from multiple perspectives.

After several years of working for Printrak, we decided that we needed to establish a standard set of proposal text for both RFP responses and sole source letters. So a coworker (Dorothy) and I flew to San Francisco for some training in the use of a particular package.

However, before I could actively participate in implementing the package, I changed jobs and became a product manager.

In other words, I was now one of the subject matter experts that not only needed to ensure the proposal text was accurate, but in some cases actually provide the proposal text that described the new features of my product.

So Dorothy and her coworker Peter had to contact me to provide my inputs to them.

Sometimes more than once.

In fact, one time they were so surprised that I finally DID provide input that Dorothy created an origami of a flying pig. I have a picture of that flying pig somewhere, but rather than hunt it up I’ll display this picture instead. You get the idea.

By Torreteo at Italian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37823185

Dorothy and Peter had the last laugh, however, because I eventually rejoined Proposals when Dorothy moved to Marketing, and therefore I was responsible for bugging the SMEs about reviewing and updating proposal text.

Dorothy and Peter left the company before I did. After one final switcheroo in which I went to Marketing and Dorothy to Proposals, Dorothy ended up leaving the company. Peter eventually left himself to get married, and move to…

(Major intrusion of reality follows.)

…Kyiv, Ukraine, in his new wife’s home country. Obviously with everyone that’s been going on over the past few days, I’ve been monitoring Peter’s social media posts closely. At the time I am writing this post (noon Pacific Time on Monday February 28), I believe Peter and his wife are still safe.

Let’s move on.

Bredemarket’s solution for proposal template services

I’ve helped clients with various types of proposal templates.

In some cases, I’ve helped clients who have purchased prepackaged proposal template solutions. As of today, I offer specific experience in Upland Qvidian and Privia products, and I’ve been told that other solutions such as RFPIO and RocketDocs are similar.

In some cases, I’ve helped clients who didn’t want to spend money to acquire those prepackaged solutions. In those cases, I’ve created Microsoft Word files, either letters which can be customized to meet the needs of a particular customer, or files from which people can extract vetted responses and incorporate them into letters or RFx responses.

In either case, my clients benefit from responses that have been reviewed by subject matter experts for accuracy, are easy to use, and can generate business for my clients very quickly.

One of my clients was extremely happy with my solution.

“I just wanted to truly say thank you for putting these templates together. I worked on this…last week and it was extremely simple to use and I thought really provided a professional advantage and tool to give the customer….TRULY THANK YOU!”

Do you need Bredemarket’s proposal template services?

Whether you need a library of responses, or one or more template letters, I can help you.

Send me an email at john.bredehoft@bredemarket.com.
Or go to calendly.com/bredemarket to book a meeting with me.
Or go to bredemarket.com/contact/ to use my contact form.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this series on the proposal services that Bredemarket can provide, and I hope that you’ve seen how all of these services can work together.

Oh, but there’s one more thing…