Basically, I had gone through great trouble to document that Bredemarket would NOT take identity work, so I had to reverse a lot of pages to say that Bredemarket WOULD take identity work.
I may have found a few additional pages after June 1, but eventually I reached the point where everything on the Bredemarket website was completely and totally updated, and I wouldn’t have to perform any other changes.
You can predict where this is going.
Who I…was
Today it occurred to me that some of the readers of the LinkedIn Bredemarket page may not know the person behind Bredemarket, so I took the opportunity to share Bredemarket’s “Who I Am” web page on the LinkedIn page.
So yes, this biometric content marketing expert/identity content marketing expert IS available for your content marketing needs. If you’re interested in receiving my help with your identity written content, contact me.
I know that I’m the guy who likes to say that it’s all semantics. After all, I’m the person who has referred to five-page long documents as “battlecards.”
But sometimes the semantics are critically important. Take the terms “factors” and “modalities.” On the surface they sound similar, but in practice there is an extremely important difference between factors of authentication and modalities of authentication. Let’s discuss.
What is a factor?
To answer the question “what is a factor,” let me steal from something I wrote back in 2021 called “The five authentication factors.”
Something You Know. Think “password.” And no, passwords aren’t dead. But the use of your mother’s maiden name as an authentication factor is hopefully decreasing.
Something You Have. I’ve spent much of the last ten years working with this factor, primarily in the form of driver’s licenses. (Yes, MorphoTrak proposed driver’s license systems. No, they eventually stopped doing so. But obviously IDEMIA North America, the former MorphoTrust, has implemented a number of driver’s license systems.) But there are other examples, such as hardware or software tokens.
Something You Are. I’ve spent…a long time with this factor, since this is the factor that includes biometrics modalities (finger, face, iris, DNA, voice, vein, etc.). It also includes behavioral biometrics, provided that they are truly behavioral and relatively static.
Something You Do. The Cybersecurity Man chose to explain this in a non-behavioral fashion, such as using swiping patterns to unlock a device. This is different from something such as gait recognition, which supposedly remains constant and is thus classified as behavioral biometrics.
Somewhere You Are. This is an emerging factor, as smartphones become more and more prevalent and locations are therefore easier to capture. Even then, however, precision isn’t always as good as we want it to be. For example, when you and a few hundred of your closest friends have illegally entered the U.S. Capitol, you can’t use geolocation alone to determine who exactly is in Speaker Pelosi’s office.
(By the way, if you search the series of tubes for reading material on authentication factors, you’ll find a lot of references to only three authentication factors, including references from some very respectable sources. Those sources are only 60% right, since they leave off the final two factors I listed above. It’s five factors of authentication, folks. Maybe.)
The one striking thing about the five factors is that while they can all be used to authenticate (and verify) identities, they are inherently different from one another. The ridges of my fingerprint bear no relation to my 16 character password, nor do they bear any relation to my driver’s license. These differences are critical, as we shall see.
What is a modality?
In identity usage, a modality refers to different variations of the same factor. This is most commonly used with the “something you are” (biometric) factor, but it doesn’t have to be.
[M]any businesses and individuals (are adopting) biometric authentication as it been established as the most secure authentication method surpassing passwords and pins. There are many modalities of biometric authentication to pick from, but which method is the best?
After looking at fingerprints, faces, voices, and irises, Aware basically answered its “best” question by concluding “it depends.” Different modalities have their own strengths and weaknesses, depending upon the use case. (If you wear thick gloves as part of your daily work, forget about fingerprints.)
ID R&D goes a step further and argues that it’s best to use multimodal biometrics, in which the two biometrics are face and voice. (By an amazing coincidence, ID R&D offers face and voice solutions.)
The three modalities in the middle—face, voice, and fingerprint—are all clearly biometric “something you are” modalities.
But the modality on the left, “Make a body movement in front of the camera,” is not a biometric modality (despite its reference to the body), but is an example of “something you do.”
Passwords, of course, are “something you know.”
In fact, each authentication factor has multiple modalities.
For example, a few of the modalities associated with “something you have” include driver’s licenses, passports, hardware tokens, and even smartphones.
Why multifactor is (usually) more robust than multimodal
Modalities within a single authentication factor are more closely related than modalities within multiple authentication factors. As I mentioned above when talking about factors, there is no relationship between my fingerprint, my password, and my driver’s license. However, there is SOME relationship between my driver’s license and my passport, since the two share some common information such as my legal name and my date of birth.
What does this mean?
If I’ve fraudulently created a fake driver’s license in your name, I already have some of the information that I need to create a fake passport in your name.
If I’ve fraudulently created a fake iris, there’s a chance that I might already have some of the information that I need to create a fake face.
However, if I’ve bought your Coinbase password on the dark web, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I was able to also buy your passport information on the dark web (although it is possible).
Can an identity content marketing expert help you navigate these issues?
As you can see, you need to be very careful when writing about modalities and factors.
You need a biometric content marketing expert who has worked with many of these modalities.
Actually, you need an identity content marketing expert who has worked with many of these factors.
So if you are with an identity company and need to write a blog post, LinkedIn article, white paper, or other piece of content that touches on multifactor and multimodal issues, why not engage with Bredemarket to help you out?
If you’re interested in receiving my help with your identity written content, contact me.
I didn’t either. Frankly, I didn’t even work in biometrics professionally until I was in my 30s.
If you have a mad adult desire to become a biometric content marketing expert, here are five topics that I (a self-styled biometric content marketing expert) think you need to understand.
Topic One: Biometrics
Sorry to be Captain Obvious, but if you’re going to talk about biometrics you need to know what you’re talking about.
The days in which an expert could confine themselves to a single biometric modality are long past. Why? Because once you declare yourself an iris expert, someone is bound to ask, “How does iris recognition compare to facial recognition?”
And there are a number of biometric modalities. In addition to face and iris, the Biometrics Institute has cataloged a list of other biometric modalities, including fingerprints/palmprints, voice, DNA, vein, finger/hand geometry, and some more esoteric ones such as gait, keystrokes, and odor. (I wouldn’t want to manage the NIST independent testing for odor.)
As far as I’m concerned, the point isn’t to select the best biometric and ignore all the others. I’m a huge fan of multimodal biometrics, in which a person’s identity is verified or authenticated by multiple biometric types. It’s harder to spoof multiple biometrics than it is to spoof a single one. And even if you spoof two of them, what if the system checks for odor and you haven’t spoofed that one yet?
Topic Two: All the other factors
In the same way that I don’t care for people who select one biometric and ignore the others, I don’t care for some in the “passwords are dead” crowd who go further and say, “Passwords are dead. Use biometrics instead.”
Although I admire the rhyming nature of the phrase.
If you want a robust identity system, you need to use multiple factors in identity verification and authentication.
Something you know.
Something you have.
Something you are (i.e. biometrics).
Something you do.
Somewhere you are.
Again, use of multiple factors protects against spoofing. Maybe someone can create a gummy fingerprint, but can they also create a fake passport AND spoof the city in which you are physically located?
It’s not enough to understand the technical ins and outs of biometric capture, matching, and review. You need to know how biometrics are used.
One-to-one vs. one-to-many. Is the biometric that you acquire only compared to a single biometric samples, or to a database of hundreds, thousands, millions, or billions of other biometric samples?
Markets. When I started in biometrics, I only participated in two markets: law enforcement (catch bad people) and benefits (get benefit payments to the right people). There are many other markets. Just recently I have written about financial identity and educational identity. I’ve worked with about a dozen other markets personally, and there are many more.
Use cases. Related to markets, you need to understand the use cases that biometrics can address. Taking the benefits example, there’s a use case in which a person enrolls for benefits, and the government agency wants to make sure that the person isn’t already enrolled under another name. And there’s a use cases when benefits are paid to make sure that the authorized recipient receives their benefits, and no one else receives their benefits.
Legal and privacy issues. It is imperative that you understand the legal ramifications that affect your chosen biometric use case in your locality. For example, if your house has a doorbell camera that uses “familiar face detection” to identify the faces of people that come to your door, and the people that come to your door are residents of the state of Illinois, you have a BIG BIPA (Biometric Information Privacy Act) problem.
Any identity content marketing expert or biometric content marketing expert worth their salt will understand these and related issues.
Topic Four: Content marketing
This is another Captain Obvious point. If you want to present yourself as a biometric contet marketing expert or identity content marketing expert, you have to have a feel for content marketing.
The definition of content marketing is simple: It’s the process of publishing written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more leads to your business. These can include blog posts, pages, ebooks, infographics, videos, and more.
But content marketers need to be comfortable with creating at least one type of content.
Topic Five: How L-1 Identity Solutions came to be
Yes, an identity content marketing expert needs to thoroughly understand how L-1 Identity Solutions came to be.
I’m only half joking.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s (I’ll ignore FpVTE results for a moment), the fingerprint world in which I worked recognized four major vendors: Cogent, NEC, Printrak (later part of Motorola), and Sagem Morpho.
And then there were all these teeny tiny vendors that offered biometric and non-biometric solutions, including the fierce competitors Identix and Digital Biometrics, the fierce competitors Viisage and Visionics, and a bunch of other companies like Iridian.
Wel, there WERE all these teeny tiny vendors.
Until Bob LaPenta bought them all up and combined them into a single company, L-1 Identity Solutions. (LaPenta was one of the “Ls” in L-3, so he chose the name L-1 when he started his own company.)
So around 2008 the Big Four (including a post-FpVTE Motorola) became the Big Five, since L-1 Identity Solutions was now at the table with the big boys.
But then several things happened:
Motorola started selling off parts of itself. One of those parts, its Biometric Business Unit, was purchased by Safran (the company formed after Sagem and Snecma merged). This affected me because I, a Motorola employee, became an employee of MorphoTrak, the subsidiary formed when Sagem Morpho de facto acquired “Printrak” (Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit). So now the Big Five were the Big Four.
Make that the Big Three, because Safran also bought L-1 Identity Solutions, which became MorphoTrust. MorphoTrak and MorphoTrust were separate entities, and in fact competed against each other, so maybe we should say that the Big Four still existed.
Oh, and by the way, the independent company Cogent was acquired by 3M (although NEC considered buying it).
A few years later, 3M sold bits of itself (including the Cogent bit) to Gemalto.
Then in 2017, Advent International (which owned Oberthur) acquired bits of Safran (the “Morpho” part) and merged them with Oberthur to form IDEMIA. As a consequence of this, MorphoTrust de facto acquired MorphoTrak, ending the competition but requiring me to have two separate computers to access the still-separate MorphoTrust and MorphoTrak computer networks. (In passing, I have heard from two sources, but have not confirmed myself, that the possible sale of IDEMIA is on hold.)
Why do I mention all this? Because all these mergers and acquisitions have resulted in identity practitioners working for a dizzying number of firms.
As of August 2023, I myself have worked for five identity firms, but in reality four of the five are the same firm because the original Printrak International kept on getting acquired (Motorola, Safran, IDEMIA).
And that’s nothing. One of my former Printrak coworkers (R.M.) has also worked for Digital Biometrics (now part of IDEMIA), Cross Match Technologies (now part of ASSA ABLOY), Iridian (now part of IDEMIA), Datastrip, Creative Information Technology, AGNITiO, iTouch Biometrics, NDI Recognition Systems, iProov, and a few other firms here and there.
The point is that everybody knows everybody because everybody has worked with (and against) everybody. And with all the job shifts, it’s a regular Peyton Place.
Not sure which one is me, which one is R.M., and who the other people are.
Do you need an identity content marketing expert today?
Do you need someone who not only knows biometrics and content marketing, but also all the other factors, their uses, and even knows the tangled history of L-1?
Whether a student is attending a preschool, a graduate school, or something in between, the educational institution needs to know who is accessing their services. This post discusses the types of identity verification and authentication that educational institutions may employ.
Why do educational institutions need to verify and authenticate identities?
Whether little Johnny is taking his blanket to preschool, or Johnny’s mother is taking her research notes to the local university, educational institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities need to know who the attendees are. It doesn’t matter whether the institution has a physical campus, like Chaffey High School’s campus in the video above, or if the institution has a virtual campus in which people attend via their computers, tablets, or phones.
Access boils down to two questions:
Who is allowed within the educational institution?
Who is blocked from the educational institution?
Who is allowed within the educational institution?
Regardless of the type of institution, there are certain people who are allowed within the physical and/or virtual campus.
Students.
Instructors, including teachers, teaching assistants/aides, and professors.
Administrators.
Staff.
Parents of minor students (but see below).
Others.
All of these people are entitled to access to at least portions of the campus, with different people having access to different portions of the campus. (Students usually can’t enter the teacher’s lounge, and hardly anybody has full access to the computer system where grades are kept.)
Before anyone is granted campus privileges, they have to complete identity verification. This may be really rigorous, but in some cases it can’t be THAT rigorous (how many preschoolers have a government ID?). Often, it’s not rigorous at all (“Can you show me a water bill? Is this your kid? OK then.”).
Once an authorized individual’s identity is verified, they need to be authenticated when they try to enter the campus. This is a relatively new phenomenon, in response to security threats at schools. Again, this could be really rigorous. For example, when students at a University of Rhode Island dining hall want to purchase food from the cafeteria, many of then consent to have their fingerprints scanned.
But some authentiation is much less rigorous. In these cases, people merely show an ID (hopefully not a fake ID) to authenticate themselves, or a security guard says “I know Johnny.”
(Again, all this is new. Many years ago, I accompanied a former college classmate to a class at his new college, the College of Marin. If I had kept my mouth shut, the professor wouldn’t have known that an unauthenticated student was in his class.)
Who is blocked from the educational institution?
At the same time, there are people who are clearly NOT allowed within the physical and/or virtual campus. Some of these people can enter campus with special permission, while some are completely blocked.
Former students. Once a student graduates, their privileges are usually revoked, and they need special permission if they want to re-enter campus to visit teachers or friends. (Admittedly this isn’t rigorously enforced.)
Expelled students. Well, some former students have a harder time returning to campus. If you brought a gun on campus, it’s going to be much harder for you to re-enter.
Former instructors, administrators, and staff. Again, people who leave the employ of the institution may not be allowed back, and certain ones definitely won’t be allowed back.
Non-custodial parents of minor students. In some cases, a court order prohibits a natural parent from contact with their child. So the educational institutions are responsible for enforcing this court order and ensuring that the minor student leaves campus only with someone who is authorized to take the child.
Others.
So how do you keep these people off campus? There are two ways.
If they’re not on the allowlist, they can’t enter campus anyway. As part of the identity verification process for authorized individuals, there is a list of people who can enter the campus. By definition, the 8 billion-plus people who are not on that “allowlist” can’t get on campus without special permission.
Sometimes they can be put on a blocklist. Or maybe you want to KNOW that certain people can’t enter campus. The inverse of an allowlist, people who are granted access, is a blocklist, people who are prevented from getting access. (You may know “blocklist” by the older term “blacklist,” and “allowlist” by the older term “whitelist.” The Security Industry Association and the National Institute of Standards and Technology recommend updated terminology.)
There’s just one teeny tiny problem with blocklists. Sometimes they’re prohibited by law.
In some cases (but not in others), a person is required to give consent before they are enrolled in a biometric system. If you’re the ex-student who was expelled for brining a gun on campus, how motivated will you be to allow that educational institution to capture your biometrics to keep you off campus?
And yes, I realize that the expelled student’s biometrics were captured while they were a student, but once they were no longer a student, the institution would have on need to retain those biometrics. Unless they felt like it.
This situation becomes especially sticky for campuses that use video surveillance systems. Like Chaffey High School.
Chaffey High School, Ontario, California.
Now the mere installation of a video surveillance system does not (usually) result in legally prohibited behavior. It just depends upon what is done with the video.
If the video is not integrated with a biometric facial recognition system, there may not be an issue.
If Chaffey High School has its own biometric facial recognition system, then a whole host of legal factors may come into play.
If Chaffey High School does not have a biometric facial recognition system, but it gives the video to a police agency or private entity that does have a biometric facial recognition system, then some legal factors may emerge.
As you can see, educational identity is not as clear-cut as financial identity, both because financial institutions are more highly regulated and because blocklists are more controversial in educational identity. Vladimir Putin may not be able to open a financial account at a U.S. bank, but I bet he’d be allowed to enroll in an online course at a U.S. community college.
So if you are an educational institution or an identity firm who serves educational institutions, people who write for you need to know all of these nuances.
You need to provide the right information to your customers, and write it in a way that will motivate your customers to take the action you want them to take.
Speaking of motivating customers, are you with an identity firm or educational institution and need someone to write your marketing text?
Someone with 29 years of identity/biometric marketing experience?
Someone who understands that technological, organizational, and legal issues surrounding the use of identity solutions?
Someone who will explain why your customers should care about these issues, and the benefits a compliant solution provides to them?
If I can help you create your educational identity content, we need to talk.
Stump the Experts at WWDC 2010 Stefan Haubold • CC BY-SA 3.0
One way for your firm to publicize its offerings is through company LinkedIn articles. My LinkedIn article, written by my company Bredemarket, discusses…well, company LinkedIn articles. It also discusses:
Why you should write LinkedIn articles.
Why companies should write LinkedIn articles under their own names.
How to create LinkedIn articles.
Finally, who can write your LinkedIn articles. (I have a suggestion.)
Bank of America, Euclid Avenue, Ontario, California.
Here’s a sign of the times from Ontario, California. The sign at the end of this video appears on the door of a bank branch in downtown Ontario, and basically says that if you wanted to go to THIS branch on Saturday, you’re out of luck.
Of course, that assumes that you actually WANT to go to a physical bank branch location. Unlike the old days, when banks were substantive buildings that you visited to deposit and withdraw money, now banks can be found in our smartphones.
What locational, technological, and organizational changes have taken place at banks over the last 50 years? And now that you can open an account to buy crypto on your smartphone, does your financial institution’s onboarding solution actually WORK in determining financial identity?
Three changes in banking over the last fifty years
Over the last fifty years, banking has changed to the point where someone from 1973 wouldn’t even recognize “banking” today. Stick around to see a video from a company called “Apple” showing you how to use a “wallet” on a “smartphone” to pay for things even if you’re not carrying your “chip card.” Karl Malden would be spinning in his grave. So let’s talk about the three changes:
The locational change.
The technological change.
The organizational change.
The locational change: from stand-alone buildings to partitioned grocery store sections
When I was growing up, a “bank” (or a “savings & loan,” which we will discuss later) was located in a building where you would go on weekdays (or even Saturdays!) and give money to, or get money from, a person referred to as a teller.
There was this whole idea of “going to the bank,” perhaps on your lunch hour because you couldn’t go to the bank on Sunday at midnight, could you?
The first crack in the whole idea of “going to the bank” was the ability to bank without entering the door of the bank…and being able to bank on Sunday at midnight if you felt like it. Yes, I’m talking about Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), where the “teller,” instead of being a person, was a bunch of metal and a TV screen. The first ATM appeared in 1967, but they didn’t really become popular until several years later.
For the most part, these ATMs were located at the bank buildings themselves. But those buildings were costly, and as competition between banks increased, banks sought alternatives. By 1996, a new type of banking location emerged (PDF):
The largest U.S. commercial banks are restructuring their retail operations to reduce the cost disadvantage resulting from a stagnant deposit base and stiffer competition. As part of this effort, some banks are opening “supermarket,” or “in-store,” branches: a new type of banking office within a large retail outlet. An alternative to the traditional bank office, the supermarket branch enables banks to improve the efficiency of the branch network and offer greater convenience to customers.
To traditionalists, these bank branches looked pretty flimsy. Where are the brick and (fake) marble walls that protect my cash? Heck, anyone can walk into the store and just steal all my money, right?
Well, these newfangled bank branches apparently WERE able to protect our cash, and the idea of banking right in the grocery store proved to be very popular because of its convenience.
But the changes were just beginning.
The technological change: from store sections to smartphones
As banks changed where they were located, there were technological changes also.
During the 1990s, more and more people were using home computers. As the computers and their security became more and more sophisticated, some people asked why we needed to “go to the bank” (either a stand-alone building or a partitioned area next to the cigarettes) at all. Why not just bank at the computer? So PC banking emerged.
The term “PC banking” refers to the online access of banking information from a personal computer. A solution for both personal or business banking needs, this type of financial management allows you to conduct transactions using an Internet connection and your computer in lieu of a trip to the local bank branch or the use of an ATM. PC banking enables an account holder to perform real-time account activities and effectively manage finances in a way that avoids the hassle of daytime bank visits and eliminates the postage required to pay bills by mail.
Ah yes; there was another benefit. You could use the computer to pay your bills electronically. The U.S. Postal Service was NOT a fan of this change.
As we crossed into the new millennium, the online banking ideas got even wilder. Cellular telephones, which followed a modified version of the “Princess phone” form factor, became more complex devices with their own teeny-tiny screens, just like their larger computer cousins. Eventually, banks began offering their services on these “smartphones,” so that you didn’t even need a computer to perform your banking activities.
Imagine putting the video below on 8mm film and traveling back in time to show it to a 1973 banking customer. They would have no idea what was going on in the film.
But are PC and smartphone banking secure? After all, smartphones don’t have brick or (fake) marble walls. We’ll get to that question.
The organizational change: from banks to…who knows what?
The third change was not locational or technological, but a change in terms of business organization. Actually, many changes.
Back in 1973, the two major types of banks were banks, and something called “savings & loans.” Banks had been around for centuries, but savings & loans were a little newer, having started in 1831. They were regulated a little differently: banks were insured by the FDIC, S&Ls by the FSLIC.
Everything was all hunky dory until the 1980s, when the S&Ls started collapsing. This had monumental effects; for example, this PDF documenting the S&L crisis is hosted on the FDIC website, because the FSLIC was abolished many years ago.
After savings & loans became less popular, other “banks” emerged.
Members-only associations called credit unions had started in 1864, and in the United States they had their own government-sponsored insurance, separate from the FDIC and FSLIC.
But there was one similarity between banks, savings & loans, credit unions, and payday loans. They all dealt in U.S. dollars (or the currency of the nation where they were located).
Enter the crypto providers, who traded cryptocurrencies that weren’t backed by any government. Since they were very new entrants, they didn’t have to make the locational and technological changes that banks and related entities had to make; they zoomed straight to the newest methods. Everything was performed on your smartphone (or computer), and you never went to a physical place.
Now, let’s open a financial account
Back in 1973, the act of opening an account required you to travel to a bank branch, fill out some forms, and give the teller some form of U.S. dollars.
You can still do that today, for the most part. But it was hard to do that in the summer and fall of 2020 when Bredemarket started.
Bredemarket pretty much started because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and those first few months of Bredemarket’s existence were adversely affected by COVID-19. When I wanted to start a bank account for Bredemarket, I COULDN’T travel to my nearby bank branch to open an account. I HAD to open my account with my computer.
So, without a teller (human or otherwise) even meeting me, I had to prove that I was a real person, and give my bank enough information during onboarding so that they knew I wasn’t a money-laundering terrorist. Banks had to follow government regulations (know your customer, anti-money laundering, know your business), even in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.
This onboarding process had to be supported whether you were or were not at a physical location of a financial institution.
Whether you were conducting business in person, on a computer, or on a smartphone.
Whether you were working with U.S. dollars or (as crypto regulations tightened) something named after a dog or an entire planet or whatever.
How can you support all that?
Liminal’s “Link™ Index for Account Opening in Financial Services”
Back in 2020 when I was onboarding the new-fashioned way, I had no way of predicting that in less than two years, I would be working for a company that helped financial institutions onboard customers the new-fashioned way.
At the time, I estimated that there were over 80 companies that provided such services.
According to Liminal, my estimate was too low. Or maybe it was too high.
Liminal’s July 2023 report, “Link™ Index for Account Opening in Financial Services,” covers companies that provide onboarding services that allow financial institutions to use their smartphone apps (or web pages) to sign up new clients.
Account opening solutions for the financial services industry are critical to ensuring compliance and preventing fraud, enabling companies to effectively identify new users during customer registration and deliver a seamless onboarding experience. The primary purpose of these solutions is to facilitate mandatory compliance checks, with a particular emphasis on the Know Your Customer (KYC) process.
If I can summarize KYC in layperson terms, it basically means that the person opening a financial institution account is who they say they are. For example, it ensures that Vladimir Putin can’t open a U.S. bank acccount under the name “Alan Smithee” to evade U.S. bans on Russian national transctions.
Remember how I found over 80 identify proofing vendors? Liminal found a few more who claimed to offer identity proofing, but thinks that less than 80 firms can actually deliver.
Around 150 vendors claim to offer account opening compliance and fraud solutions in banking, but only 32 (21.3%) have the necessary product features to meet buyer demands.
Now I have not purchased the entire Liminal report, and even the Executive Summary (which I do have) is “privileged and confidential” so I can’t reprint it here. But I guess that I can say that Liminal used something called the “Link Score” to determine which vendors made the top category, and which didn’t.
I’m not sure how the vendors who DIDN’T make the top category are reacting to their exclusion, but I can bet that they’re not happy.
Writing about Financial Identity
As you can gather, there are a number of issues that you have to address if you want to employ identity proofing at a financial institution.
And if you’re an identity firm or financial institution, you need to provide the right information to your customers, and write it in a way that will motivate your customers to take the action you want them to take.
Speaking of motivating customers, are you with an identity firm or financial institution and need someone to write your marketing text?
Someone with 29 years of identity/biometric marketing experience?
Someone who consistently tosses around acronyms like ABM, FRVT, KYB, KYC, and PAD, but who would never dump undefined acronyms on your readers? (If you’re not a financial/identity professional and don’t know these acronyms, they stand for anti-money laundering, Face Recognition Vendor Test, Know Your Business, Know Your Customer, and Presentation Attack Detection.)
Someone who will explain why your customers should care about these acronyms, and the benefits a compliant solution provides to them?
If I can help you create your financial identity content, we need to talk.
I remember the day that my car skidded down Monterey Pass Road in Monterey Park, California, upside down, my seatbelt saving my brain from…um…very bad things. (I promised myself that I’d make this post NON-gory.)
I was returning from lunch to my employer farther south on Monterey Pass Road when a car hit me from the side, flipping my car over so that it skidded down Monterey Pass Road, upside down. Only my seat belt saved my from certain death.
Now some of you who know me are asking, “John, you’ve lived in Ontario and Upland for the past several decades. Why were you 30 miles away, in Monterey Park?”
Well, back in 1991, after working for Rancho Cucamonga companies for several years, I ended up commuting to a company in Monterey Park, California, at least an hour’s drive one way from my home. Driving toward downtown Los Angeles in the morning, and away from downtown Los Angeles in the afternoon. If you know, you know.
After I left the Monterey Park company, I consulted or worked for companies in Pomona, Brea, Anaheim, Irvine, and other cities. But for most of the next three decades, I was still driving at least an hour one-way every day to get from home to work.
As I’ll note later in this post, some people are still commuting today. And for all I know I may commute again also.
I learn the acronym WFH
That all stopped in March 2020 when a worldwide pandemic sent all non-essential personnel at IDEMIA’s Anaheim office to work from home (WFH). Now there were some IDEMIA employees, such as salespeople, who had been working from home for years, but this was the first time that a whole bunch of us were doing it.
Some of us had to upgrade our home equipment: mesh networks, special face illumination lighting, and other things. And now, instead of having a couple of people participating in meetings remotely, ALL of us were doing so. (Before 2020, the two words “Zoom background” would be incomprehensible to me. After 2020, I understood those words intimately.)
This new work practice continued after I left IDEMIA, as I started Bredemarket, joined Incode Technologies for a little over a year, and returned (for now) to Bredemarket again.
The U.S. Marine Corps supported WFH (for certain positions) in 2010, long before COVID. This image was released by the United States Marine Corps with the ID 100324-M-6847A-001 (next). This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing.العربية ∙ বাংলা ∙ Deutsch ∙ Deutsch (Sie-Form) ∙ English ∙ español ∙ euskara ∙ فارسی ∙ français ∙ italiano ∙ 日本語 ∙ 한국어 ∙ македонски ∙ മലയാളം ∙ Plattdüütsch ∙ Nederlands ∙ polski ∙ پښتو ∙ português ∙ slovenščina ∙ svenska ∙ Türkçe ∙ українська ∙ 简体中文 ∙ 繁體中文 ∙ +/−, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23181833
WFH benefits
There are two benefits to working from home:
First, it preserves your brain. Not just from the horrible results of a commuting automobile accident. For the last three-plus years, I’ve gotten more rest and sleep since I’m not waking up before 6am and getting home after 6pm. And I’m not sitting in traffic on the 57, waiting for an accident to clear.
Second, it provides the best talent to your employer. Why? Because it can hire you. I just spent over a year working for a company headquartered in San Francisco, and I didn’t have to move to San Francisco to do it. In fact, when my product marketing team reached its apex, we had two people in Southern California, one in England, and one in Sweden. None of us had to move to San Francisco to work there, and my company was not restricted to hiring people who could get to San Francisco every day.
But that doesn’t stop some companies from insisting on office work
In-office presence controversy predates COVID (remember Marissa Mayer and Yahoo?), and now that COVID has receded, the “return to office” drumbeat has gotten louder.
Now I’m not saying I’ll never work on-site again. Maybe someday I’ll even accept an on-site position in Monterey Park.
But I’m not that thrilled about going down Monterey Pass Road again.
In the meantime…
…since I’m NOT full-time employed, and since my home office is well equipped (I have Nespresso!), I have the time to make YOUR company’s messaging better.
If you can use Bredemarket’s expertise for your biometric, identity, technology, or general blog posts, case studies, white papers, or other written content, contact me.
Have you ever had a piece of content go viral, but wish that ANOTHER piece of content had gone viral instead? Join the club.
Three examples of unintentional viral content
Here are three examples in which the “wrong” content went viral. Two of the examples are personal, but the first example has nothing to do with me, the Internet, or even the 21st century.
Example 1: Steam behind the wrong song
Back in the 1960s, a singer named Gary DeCarlo was working under the pseudonym Garrett Scott. “Garrett Scott” needed a single, so he was slotted to record a song called “Sweet Laura Lee.”
Because it was a 1960s single, it needed to have a B-side. You couldn’t let all that vinyl on the back of the record go to waste. Any song would do, since it was just filler for “Sweet Laura Lee.”
So DeCarlo and two of his friends resurrected a 1961 song called “Kiss Him Goodbye,” went to the studio, added a silly chant because the 1961 song lacked a chorus, and cranked out the B-side in an evening session. They did it so quickly that the chorus didn’t even have any real words, just “na na.” Actually, the B-side was SUPPOSED to be bad so that disc jockeys would play the A-side:
B-sides in the ’60s were often ad-hoc affairs designed to be clearly inferior to the A-side so that disc jockeys wouldn’t flip the record. The three musicians who recorded this had that in mind for this song, and kept it simple: there is no bass or guitar on the track….
The song “Sweet Laura Lee” went nowhere, but who cares? The record company liked the B-side, invented a fake band name Steam, and the song “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” went to the number 1 position on the Billboard charts. A real band named Steam was formed and went on tour…without Gary DeCarlo (although DeCarlo received songwriting royalties).
Example 2: Becoming the unintentional Shipley expert
Fast forward to the 21st century and my creation of blog content for Bredemarket.
I needed to populate my blog with both content marketing-related content and proposal-related content, so in December 2021 I wrote a post entitled “96 Smiles: All about the Shipley Business Development Lifecycle.” I’ve been familiar with the Shipley lifecycle for decades, but probably not as familiar as hundreds if not thousands of proposal practitioners.
So now, right behind Shipley Associates itself, the next leading authority on the Shipley Business Development Lifecycle is…ME.
So now the bredemarket.com website is getting all sorts of traffic related to Shipley, and my Ubersuggest account is, um, suggesting that I optimize the website to capture even more Shipley traffic.
Except that I’m not really doing much with the Shipley process itself; I just talked about it.
Of course, the traffic may have nothing to do with capture and proposal management, since the post makes several explicit and implicit references to the ? and the Mysterians song “96 Tears.”
What I HAVEN’T ignored is the slew of social media channels for Bredemarket. Some of you are aware of this, since you’ve recently received invitations from me to follow Bredemarket on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and YouTube. If you haven’t, feel free to click on the appropriate links and subscribe now.
So as I’ve been building up my Bredemarket social/content presence and spending a lot of time on this, I received a notification from Facebook this week that, with no effort on my own, my neglected ontarioemperor Facebook page now has over 600 followers.
Now I’m not sure how much Ontario Emperor’s Facebook popularity can benefit Bredemarket, since there’s little or no discernable overlap between synthetic music fans and people requiring marketing and writing services. But who knows? I could be wrong there also.
So sometimes things you want to promote don’t get popular, and things you don’t necessary want to promote get popular.
Rather than being disappointed, just go with the flow, say “na na” to the naysayers, and speak about Shipley with soothing instrumental music behind you.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
But since you care about YOUR self-promotion rather than mine, I’ll provide three tips for writing and promoting your own LinkedIn post.
How I promoted my content
Before I wrote the blog post or the LinkedIn post, I used my six questions to guide me. For my specific example, here are the questions and the answers.
Question
Primary Answer
Secondary Answer (if applicable)
Why?
I want full-time employment
I want consulting work
How?
State identity and marketing qualifications, ask employers to hire me
State identity and marketing qualifications, ask consulting clients to contract with me
What?
Blog post (jebredcal), promoted by a personal LinkedIn post
Blog post (jebredcal), promoted by a Bredemarket Identity Firm Services LinkedIn post
You’ll notice that I immediately broke a cardinal rule by having both a primary goal and a secondary goal. When you perform your own self-promotion, you will probably want to make things less messy by having only a single goal.
After the introduction (pictured above) with its “If you need a full-time employee” call to action, I then shared three identity-related blog posts from the Bredemarket blog to establish my “biometric content marketing expert” (and “identity content marketing expert”) credentials. I then closed with a dual call to action for employers and potential consulting clients. (I told you it is messy to have two goals.)
If you want to see my jebredcal post “Top 3 Bredemarket Identity Posts in June 2023 (so far),” click here.
So how did I get the word out about this personal blog post? I chose LinkedIn. (In my case, hiring managers probably aren’t going to check my two Instagram accounts.)
It was simple to write the LinkedIn text, since I repurposed the introduction of the blog post itself. I added four hashtags, and then the post went live. You can see it here.
And by the way, feel free to like the LinkedIn post, comment on it, or even reshare it. I’ll explain why below.
Third, the “LinkedIn Love” promotion
So how did I promote it? Via the “LinkedIn Love” concept. (Some of you know where I learned about LinkedIn Love.)
To get LinkedIn love, I asked a few trusted friends in the identity industry to like, comment, or reshare the post. This places the post on my friends’ feeds, where their identity contacts will see it.
A few comments:
I don’t do this for every post, or else I will have no friends. In fact, this is the first time that I’ve employed “LinkedIn Love” in months.
I only asked friends in the identity industry, since these friends have followers who are most likely to hire a Senior Product Marketing Manager or Senior Content Marketing Manager.
I only asked a few friends in the identity industry, although eventually some friends that I didn’t ask ended up engaging with the post anyway.
I have wonderful friends. After several of them gave “LinkedIn Love,” The post received significant engagement. As of Friday morning, the post had acquired over 1,700 impresions. That’s many, many more than my posts usually acquire.
I don’t know if this activity will directly result in full-time employment or increased consulting work. But it certainly won’t hurt.
Three steps to promote YOUR content
But the point of this post isn’t MY job search. It’s YOURS (or whatever it is you want to promote).
For example, one of my friends who is also seeking full-time employment wanted to know how to use a LinkedIn post to promote THEIR OWN job search.
Now you don’t need to use my six questions. You don’t need to create a blog post before creating the LinkedIn post. And you certainly don’t need to create two goals. (Please don’t…unless you want to.)
In fact, you can create and promote your own LinkedIn post in just THREE steps.
Step One: What do you want to say?
My six questions obviously aren’t the only method to collect your thoughts. There are many, many other tools that achieve the same purpose. The important thing is to figure out what you want to say.
Start at the end. What action do you want the reader to take after reading your LinkedIn post? Do you want them to read your LinkedIn profile, or download your resume, or watch your video, or join your mailing list, or email or call you? Whatever it is, make sure your LinkedIn post includes the appropriate “call to action.”
Work on the rest. Now that you know how your post will end, you can work on the rest of the post. Persuade your reader to follow your call to action. Explain how you will benefit them. Address the post to the reader, your customer (for example, a potential employer), and adopt a customer focus.
Step Two: Say it.
If you don’t want to write the post yourself, then ask a consultant, a friend, or even a generative AI tool to write something for you. (Just because I’m a “get off my lawn” guy regarding generative AI doesn’t mean that you have to be.)
(And before you ask, there are better consultants than Bredemarket for THIS writing job. My services are designed and priced for businesses, not individuals.)
After your post is written by you or someone (or something) else, have one of your trusted friends review it and see if the written words truly reflect how amazing and outstanding you are.
Once you’re ready, post it to LinkedIn. Don’t delay, even if it isn’t perfect. (Heaven knows this blog post isn’t perfect, but I posted it anyway.) Remember that if you don’t post your promotional LinkedIn post, you are guaranteed to get a 0% response to it.
Step Three: Promote it.
Your trusted friends will come in handy for the promotion part—if they have LinkedIn accounts. Privately ask your trusted friends to apply “LinkedIn Love” to your post in the same way that my trusted friends did it for me.
By the way—if I know you, and you’d like me to promote your LinkedIn post, contact me via LinkedIn (or one of the avenues on the Bredemarket contact page) and I’ll do what I can.
And even if I DON’T know you, I can promote it anyway.
I’ve never met Mary Smith in my life, but she says that she read my Bredemarket blog post “Applying the “Six Questions” to LinkedIn Self-promotion.” Because she selects such high-quality reading material, I’m resharing Mary’s post about how she wants to be the first human to visit Venus. If you can help her realize her dream, scroll to the bottom of her post and donate to her GoFundMe.
Hey, whatever it takes to get the word out.
Let me know if you use my tips…or if you have better ways to achieve the same purpose.
Are you an executive with a small or medium sized identity/biometrics firm?
If so, you want to share the story of your identity firm. But what are you going to say?
How will you figure out what makes your firm better than all the inferior identity firms that compete with you?
How will you get the word out about why your identity firm beats all the others?
Are you getting tired of my repeated questions?
Are you ready for the answers?
Your identity firm differs from all others
Over the last 29 years, I (John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket) have worked for and with over a dozen identity firms, either as an employee or as a consultant.
You’d think that since I have worked for so many different identity firms, it’s an easy thing to start working with a new firm by simply slapping down the messaging that I’ve created for all the other identity firms.
The messaging that I created in my various roles at IDEMIA and its corporate predecessors was dramatically different than the messaging I created as a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Incode Technologies, which was also very different from the messaging that I created for my previous Bredemarket clients.
IDEMIA benefits such as “servicing your needs anywhere in the world” and “applying our decades of identity experience to solve your problems” are not going to help with a U.S.-only firm that’s only a decade old.
Similarly, messaging for a company that develops its own facial recognition algorithms will necessarily differ from messaging for a company that chooses the best third-party facial recognition algorithms on the market.
So which messaging is right?
It depends on who is paying me.
How your differences affect your firm’s messaging
When creating messaging for your identity firm, one size does not fit all, for the reasons listed above.
The content of your messaging will differ, based upon your differentiators.
For example, if you were the U.S.-only firm established less than ten years ago, your messaging would emphasize the newness of your solution and approach, as opposed to the stodgy legacy companies that never updated their ideas.
And if your firm has certain types of end users, such as law enforcement users, your messaging would probably feature an abundance of U.S. flags.
In addition, the channels that you use for your messaging will differ.
Identity firms will not want to market on every single social media channel. They will only market on the channels where their most motivated buyers are present.
That may be your own website.
Or LinkedIn.
Or Facebook.
Or Twitter.
Or Instagram.
Or YouTube.
Or TikTok.
Or a private system only accessible to people with a Top Secret Clearance.
It may be more than one of these channels, but it probably won’t be all of them.
But before you work on your content or channels, you need to know what to say, and how to communicate it.
How to know and communicate your differentiators
As we’ve noted, your firm is different than all others.
How do you know the differences?
How do you know what you want to talk about?
How do you know what you DON’T want to talk about?
Here are three methods to get you started on knowing and communicating your differentiators in your content.
Method One: The time-tested SWOT analysis
If you talk to a marketer for more than two seconds about positioning a company, the marketer will probably throw the acronym “SWOT” back at you. I’ve mentioned the SWOT acronym before.
For those who don’t know the acronym, SWOT stands for
Strengths. These are internal attributes that benefit your firm. For example, your firm is winning a lot of business and growing in customer count and market share.
Weaknesses. These are also internal attributes, but in this case the attributes that detract from your firm. For example, you have very few customers.
Opportunities. These are external factors that enhance your firm. One example is a COVID or similar event that creates a surge in demand for contactless solutions.
Threats. The flip side is external factors that can harm your firm. One example is increasing privacy regulations that can slow or halt adoption of your product or service.
If you’re interested in more detail on the topic, there are a number of online sources that discuss SWOT analyses. Here’s TechTarget’s discussion of SWOT.
The common way to create the output from a SWOT analysis is to create four boxes and list each element (S, W, O, and T) within a box.
Once this is done, you’ll know that your messaging should emphasize the strengths and opportunities, and downplay or avoid the weaknesses and threats.
Or alternatively argue that the weaknesses and threats are really strengths and opportunities. (I’ve done this before.)
Method Two: Think before you create
Personally, I believe that a SWOT analysis is not enough. Before you use the SWOT findings to create content, there’s a little more work you have to do.
I recommend that before you create content, you should hold a kickoff of the content creation process and figure out what you want to do before you do it.
During that kickoff meeting, you should ask some questions to make sure you understand what needs to be done.
I’ve written about kickoffs and questions before, and I’m not going to repeat what I already said. If you want to know more:
Now that you’ve locked down the messaging, it’s time to actually create the content that differentiates your identity firm from all the inferior identity firms in the market. While some companies can proceed right to content creation, others may run into one of two problems.
The identity firm doesn’t have any knowledgeable writers on staff. To create the content, you need people who understand the identity industry, and who know how to write. Some firms lack people with this knowledge and capability.
The identity firm has knowledgeable writers on staff, but they’re busy. Some companies have too many things to do at once, and any knowledgeable writers that are on staff may be unavailable due to other priorities.
This is where you supplement you identity firm’s existing staff with one or more knowledgeable writers who can work with you to create the content that leaves your inferior competitors in the dust.
What is next?
So do you need a knowledgeable biometric content marketing expert to create your content?
One who has been in the biometric industry for 29 years?
One who has been writing short and long form content for more than 29 years?
Are you getting tired of my repeated questions again?
Well then I’ll just tell you that Bredemarket is the answer to your identity/biometric content marketing needs.
Are you ready to take your identity firm to the next level with a compelling message that increases awareness, consideration, conversion, and long-term revenue? Let’s talk today!
Bredemarket 
