Is Your Company Ignoring Your Prospects?

Are you locking your prospects out?

Designed by Freepik.

Ignoring your prospects is NOT a winning business strategy. But a lot of companies do it anyway by not communicating regularly with their prospects.

If you ignore your prospects, your prospects will ignore you.

Meetings and money, via a third party

Of my three Bredemarket meetings (so far) today, the second was the most promising.

A person at a large company needs consulting services from me. All we need to do is work out the mechanics. The large company relies on a third party to manage its indpendent contractor relationships, including onboarding, time cards, and payments for hourly work. I wanted to learn about the third party, but I ran into walls when seeking current information about the firm.

The third party’s website is static

The third party’s website talks about its services, some unique aspects about the business, the story of its founder (a fascinating story), its technology partners, and its call to action. It provides ALMOST everything…with the exception of CURRENT information.

Does your company website look like http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm?
  • No press releases from the third party.
  • No links to news articles that mention the third party.
  • Not even a blog.

Basically if you want CURRENT information about the company…

…you get crickets.

African field cricket, Gryllus bimaculatus. By Arpingstone – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=620363

Not literally, but you know what I mean.

Which makes me wonder—is the third party doing anything NOW? Or was all of the existing content set up when the company was founded a decade ago?

If text like this is on your home page, you have a problem. From https://serverfault.com/questions/65952/objective-speed-comparison-of-windows-7-vs-windows-xp, which acknowledges that this text is over 13 years old. Does your site have old text without such an acknowledgement?

Luckily for me, I knew where to find current information on the company. Since the company is a B2B provider, I assumed that the company has a LinkedIn page. And I was right. But…

The third party’s LinkedIn page is also static

As you probably know, company LinkedIn pages have several subpages. The “About” supage talks about the third party company’s services, and the “People” subpage links to the profiles of the company’s employees, including the founder. So I went to the “Posts” subpage for the third party…

…and found crickets.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSW6IFt8OpQ

Not literally, but you know what I mean.

In nearly a decade of existence, the company has NEVER written a LinkedIn post to reach out to its prospects or customers.

Ignoring your prospects

As I’ve said before, companies that refuse to generate current content in the form of blog posts or social media posts make it appear that your company is no longer an ongoing, viable concern.

By Yintan at English Wikipedia, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63631702

And this is so easy to fix.

Pay attention to your prospects by providing current content.

If you ignore your prospects, your prospects will ignore you.

Are you ready to stop ignoring your prospects?

If you need help creating content for your blog, your social media platforms, or your website, Bredemarket can help you regain credibility with your prospects and customers.

Authorize Bredemarket, Ontario California’s content marketing expert, to help your firm produce words that return results.

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Quick Tech Takes on Speech Neuroprosthesis, AEM Dynamic Media, and Graph Databases in IAM

Yes, I’m stealing the Biometric Update practice of combining multiple items into a single post, but this lets me take a brief break from identity (mostly) and examine three general technology stories:

  • Advances in speech neuroprosthesis (the Pat Bennett / Stanford University story).
  • The benefits of Dynamic Media for Adobe Enterprise Manager users, as described by KBWEB Consult.
  • The benefits of graph databases for Identity and Access Management (IAM) implementations, as described by IndyKite.

Speech Neuroprosthesis

First, let’s define “neuroprosthetics/neuroprosthesis”:

Neuroprosthetics “is a discipline related to neuroscience and biomedical engineering concerned with developing neural prostheses, artificial devices to replace or improve the function of an impaired nervous system.

From: Neuromodulation (Second Edition), 2018

Various news sources highlighted the story of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patient Pat Bennett and her somewhat-enhanced ability to formulate words, resulting from research at Stanford University.

Diagram of a human highlighting the areas affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). By PaulWicks – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130714816

Because I was curious, I sought the Nature article that discussed the research in detail, “A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis.” The article describes a proof of concept of a speech brain-computer interface (BCI).

Here we demonstrate a speech-to-text BCI that records spiking activity from intracortical microelectrode arrays. Enabled by these high-resolution recordings, our study participant—who can no longer speak intelligibly owing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—achieved a 9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary (2.7 times fewer errors than the previous state-of-the-art speech BCI2) and a 23.8% word error rate on a 125,000-word vocabulary (the first successful demonstration, to our knowledge, of large-vocabulary decoding). Our participant’s attempted speech was decoded  at 62 words per minute, which is 3.4 times as fast as the previous record8 and begins to approach the speed of natural conversation (160 words per minute9).

From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06377-x

While a 125,000 word vocabulary is impressive (most adult native English speakers have a vocabulary of 20,000-35,000 words), a 76.2% accuracy rate is so-so.

Stanford Medicine published a more lay-oriented article and a video that described Bennett’s condition, and the results of the study.

For Bennett, the (ALS) deterioration began not in her spinal cord, as is typical, but in her brain stem. She can still move around, dress herself and use her fingers to type, albeit with increasing difficulty. But she can no longer use the muscles of her lips, tongue, larynx and jaws to enunciate clearly the phonemes — or units of sound, such as sh — that are the building blocks of speech….

After four months, Bennett’s attempted utterances were being converted into words on a computer screen at 62 words per minute — more than three times as fast as the previous record for BCI-assisted communication.

From https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2023/08/brain-implant-speech-als.html
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaWb1ukmYHQ

The Benefits of AEM Dynamic Media

Now let’s shift to companies that need to produce marketing collateral. Bredemarket produces collateral, but not to the scale that big companies need to produce. A single company may have to produce millions of pieces of collateral, each of which is specific to a particular product, in a particular region, for a particular audience/persona. Even Bredemarket could potentially produce all sorts of content, if it weren’t so difficult to do so:

  • A YouTube description of the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to fingerprint/face marketing executives in the identity industry.
  • An Instagram carousel post about the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to voice sales executives in the identity industry.
  • A TikTok reel about the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to marketing executives in the AI industry.

All of this specialized content, using all of these different image and video formats? I’m not gonna create all that.

But as KBWEB Consult (a boutique technology consulting firm specializing in the implementation and delivery of Adobe Enterprise Cloud technologies) points out in its article “Implementing Rapid Omnichannel Messaging with AEM Dynamic Media,” Adobe Experience Manager has tools to speed up this process and create correctly-messaged content in ALL the formats for ALL the audiences.

One of those tools is Dynamic Media.

AEM Dynamic Media accelerates omnichannel personalization, ensuring your business messages are presented quickly and in the proper formats. Starting with a master file, Dynamic Media quickly adjusts images and videos to satisfy varying asset specifications, contributing to increased content velocity.

From https://kbwebconsult.com/implementing-rapid-omnichannel-messaging-with-aem-dynamic-media/

For those who aren’t immersed in marketing talk:

The article also discusses further implementation issues that are of interest to AEM users. If you are such a user, check the article out.

Graph Databases in Identity and Access Management (IAM)

I previously said that I was MOSTLY taking a break from identity, but graph databases impact items well beyond identity.

So what is a graph database?

By Originally uploaded by Ahzf (Transferred by Obersachse) – Originally uploaded on en.wikipedia, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19279472

A graph database, also referred to as a semantic database, is a software application designed to store, query and modify network graphs. A network graph is a visual construct that consists of nodes and edges. Each node represents an entity (such as a person) and each edge represents a connection or relationship between two nodes. 

Graph databases have been around in some variation for along time. For example, a family tree is a very simple graph database…. 

Graph databases are well-suited for analyzing interconnections…

From https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/graph-database

The claim is that the interconnection analysis capabilities of graph databases are much more flexible and comprehensive than the capabilities of traditional relational databases. While graph databases are not always better than relational databases, they are better for cerrtain types of data.

To see how this applies to identity and access management (IAM), I’ll turn to IndyKite, whose Lasse Andersen recently presented on graph database use in IAM (in a webinar sponsored by Strativ Group). IndyKite describes its solution as follows (in part):

A knowledge graph that holistically captures the identities of customers and IoT devices along with the rich relationships between them

A dynamic and real-time data model that unifies disconnected identity data and business metadata into one contextualized layer

From https://www.indykite.com/identity-knowledge-graph

So what?

For example, how does such a solution benefit banking and financial services providers who wish to support financial identity?

Identity-first security to enable trusted, seamless customer experiences

From https://www.indykite.com/banking

Yes, I know that every identity company (with one exception) uses the word “trust,” and they all use the word “seamless.”

But this particular technology benefits banking customers (at least the honest ones) by using the available interconnections to provide all the essential information about the customer and the customer’s devices, in a way that does not inconvenience the customer. IndyKite claims “greater privacy and security,” along with flexibility for future expansion.

In other words, it increases velocity.

What is your technology story?

I hope you provided this quick overview of these three technology advances.

But do you have a technology story that YOU want to tell?

Perhaps Bredemarket, the technology content marketing expert, can help you select the words to tell your story. If you’re interested in talking, let me know.

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Bredemarket Work Samples, the Video Edition

I can’t share work samples that I created for Bredemarket clients, because they are ghostwritten “works for hire” that are not publicly attributed to Bredemarket.

(For the same reason, I can’t share most work samples that I created for my previous employers.)

But I CAN share work samples that I created for…Bredemarket.

The video containing this image can be found on various Bredemarket properties.

Actually, you can search through the entire Bredemarket website and social media outlets and find them.

Or you can just watch the video below, which summarizes everything.

Bredemarket Work Samples, August 2023.

Is Bredemarket on Your Favorite Social Platform?

(This is outdated. See the May 15, 2024 update.)

If you’re starting out in business, you’ve probably heard the advice that as your business branches out into social platforms, you shouldn’t try to do everything at once. Instead you should make sure that your business offering is really solid on one platform before branching out into others.

Yes, I’ve been naughty again and didn’t listen to the expert advice.

One reason is because of my curiosity. With one notable exception, I’m intrigued with the idea of trying out a new platform and figuring out how it works. Audio? Video? Let’s try it.

And as long as I’m trying it out, why not create a Bredemarket account and put content out there?

So there’s a reasonably good chance that Bredemarket is already on one of your favorite social platforms. If so, why not subscribe to Bredemarket so that you’ll get my content?

Here’s a list of Bredemarket’s text, image, audio, and video accounts on various social platforms. Be sure to follow or subscribe!

  • Apple Podcasts (link here)
  • Google Podcasts (link here)