TSA Told To Tell Children That Groping Them Is A Game... Horrifying Sex Abuse Experts

Apparently TSA agents are being told that one way to handle the new groping pat downs for children is to try to make it out to be some sort of "game." This is apparently horrifying some sex abuse experts who point out that a common tactic in abuse cases is to tell the kids that they're just "playing a game." The TSA has said that the newer patdowns will not apply to children under 12, but the rules have been somewhat unclear -- leading to the statement from a TSA director, James Marchand:

"You try to make it as best you can for that child to come through. If you can come up with some kind of a game to play with a child, it makes it a lot easier."

He also said that the idea of making it a game would become a part of the TSA's training. Ken Wooden, who runs an organization to try to stop sex abuse of children was not pleased:

"How can experts working at the TSA be so incredibly misinformed and misguided to suggest that full body pat downs for children be portrayed as a game?" Wooden asked in an email. "To do so is completely contrary to what we in the sexual abuse prevention field have been trying to accomplish for the past thirty years."

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Pitfalls and Lessons Learned of Business Rules Implementation - A Business Analyst Perspective Perspective

Senior Artemis Alliance staff, drawing on their practical experience with what can go wrong from management, technical, and business analysis perspectives, provided insight into how and why business rules initiatives fail and strategies to assure the success of such initiatives.


by Alyce Neperud, Artemis Principal and Senior Business Analyst
Significant analysis pitfalls include:
Resistance to change Separation of rules from requirements Poor repository planning Selecting the wrong people to be rules analysts Solving the same problem in different ways No champion
Success Strategies
To overcome resistance to change:
Educate to provide better understanding of why the organization is doing it this way. Build support within all areas.DevelopmentAnalysisTestingProject Management Enable them to “skin their knees”.Let the team make mistakes quickly and see the value of the approach. Bring understanding of the “big picture” and the value of the approach down-stream in the development process.
To prevent the separation of rules from requirements:
Teach them to write good requirements and good rules.Avoid having one group writing requirements and another writing rules. Use concrete examples.Show the new version of artifacts after introducing the concrete examples.Tell the entire story in an integrated manner. Use short, fast iterations with experienced review to provide experience and feedback
To encourage good repository planning:
Do not take a document centric approach--focus on writing good rules rather than on where they fit in the document. Use knowledgeable people in designing the rules repository. Work through the versioning and change management in detail. Execute full rule lifecycle testing of the repository.
To select the right rules analysts:
Do not assume that every subject matter expert will be a good analyst. Do not assign critical tasks to people who are unproven. Have internal or external mentors who have time to help Pair experienced people with inexperienced. Explicitly determine skill levels of team members.
To avoid different solutions to the same problem:
Establish model for sharing information and lessons learned. Consistency is essential to precision. Do not let separate groups make their own decisions. Have some experts looking across the entire set. Do not overwork your experts. Be careful in how you tasks are assigned to avoid overlapping work. Alyce’s advice for the ‘no champion’ problem ia simple: Get one! No champion equates to a greatly reduced probability of success.
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GREAT Marketing will Ruin a GOOD Product

Sounds counter-intuitive doesn't it, but it's absolutely true.  Great marketing can simply ruin a low-quality or even good-quality product or service.  Before you dismiss this post on its face, let me offer an example we can all relate to.

Banking in the 00s has become a "Gotcha Marketer's" paradise.  Sky-high ATM fees, bank fees, huge conglomerates with no ties or interest in the community.  It's all pretty discouraging.

According to Bart Narter, senior vice president at Celent, a banking industry research firm, "Overdraft charges, in particular, generate customer steam. Fee income, primarily from bounced checks and overdrafts on debit card, account for close to half of all bank profits."

So while banks have been running brilliant marketing campaigns with spectacular offers like "Free Checking," "24-hour online banking" and "no minimum balance", the joke is on each and every one of us.  Big banks simply can’t live up to their own hype and still turn the kind of profits their investors demand.

A recent J.D. Power and Associates survey reports that satisfaction with banks in general, out of a possible score of 1,000 points, is now at a level of 748. That's down slightly from 763 three years ago. But what has really plummeted is loyalty. In the 2007 survey, 46% of customers said they "definitely" would not switch banks in the next 12 months. That figure has fallen to only 34% of customers in 2010, which represents a 26% decline.

So while great marketing can win you new customers, it's how you deliver your product or service that ultimately retains them.  Let your marketing promise the stars and you will only disappoint those hard-won new customers.

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Context sensitive Rule Management – Part 2

In my March 28th blog, I discussed process centric thinking and mapping business rules to process. As I stated earlier, business is a set of processes/services that it provides to its consumers. Business rules define how each process functions and how processes taken together allow a business to function. Let’s take an example of e-Commerce web site which takes orders from customers and fulfills customer’s orders. In this case, one process for this organization is, “Order fulfillment”. At the highest level it can be defined as
Gather customer information
Gather items that customer ordered
Take method of payment
Place a block or authorization on payment
Check the stock to fulfill the items that customer ordered
Place them in one or more boxes
Ship them to customer
Upon customer receipt, charge him.

Each step may itself explode into complex multiple sub steps or processes. So depending on organization size and number of processes; interactions between them may be very complex to define. When enterprise wide initiatives are made, even at the process level, people quickly get confused in communications primarily because they lack a common enterprise-wide vocabulary. The solution is to get control over what business can be defining by:

1) Creating common enterprise wide vocabulary thru which every one can communicate. (No interpreted meanings. Clear definitions)
2) Creating processes by using the vocabulary defined above to the granularity desired
3) Creating teams to define a process or sub process with an understanding of its functionality in end to end process definition.
4) Defining Requirements using common vocabulary (Enterprise repository) and creating any additional vocabulary before using it in Requirements

Strictly following the above rules automatically applies the concepts of “Contract first”, “SOA”, “Integration from day 1”, and handful unambiguous documents.

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BEST PRACTICE

The term ’best practice’ is a simple concept. I am at point A and I want to get to point B. How should I go about it? I brainstorm some options. Have I done something like this before? Has somebody else done this before or something similar to it and what were the results? What resources are available to me? How quickly do I need to achieve my goal, what do I need to be prepared for at point B, what are the consequences of my actions? I make a decision based on my goals, values, and strengths. If part way there I learn something new, I make adjustments. If many have gone from point A to point B before me, I have a broader base of experience than my own to draw from. The other experiences are not likely to match my own exactly, but I will assess them to see if they are applicable -provided I have the information to do so. If others who have experienced this situation first hand have found some common ground or best practices, this is even more valuable. I have best practices and examples of these practices to reinforce my understanding and guide me.

In the context of business rules, what is currently available to help us navigate from point A to B, or even from A to Z? Our knowledge is much more fragmented than in general software development practices. On one end of the spectrum, we have a significant body of knowledge on defining and modeling business rules, independent of a technology implementation. On the other end, we have the low level details for using a business rules engine. The problem is the knowledge gap in-between. While we see examples of businesses that have achieved success, we don’t have a body of best practices yet to guide us. We need to make more connections from one end of the spectrum to the other. If the gap persists, we will not achieve the true value of business rules.

We need to work in both directions, from business to implementation and from implementation to business. From the implementation end, we will not realize business change by simply extracting rules out of code and putting them in a rules engine. We need to help our organizations identify and understand the opportunities made possible by business rules. We then need to organize and implement our rules in such a way that we can achieve the business objectives.

As a business we may be looking to implement business rules because we value consistent application of business practices, managed complexity, retained and accessible knowledge, and quick response to business change. But more specifically where are we today and where do we want to be?

Business X, for example, is feeling pain because it currently takes six months to implement and rollout a moderate-sized change. This type of change is not uncommon to the business – it is a regulated industry and there is a regular cycle of change. If the business values quick response to business change, how quick is quick? What type of change occurs and how often? What are the change points? Who has the knowledge to make these changes? Who should implement the change and what type of change control process is needed? How do we test the change? Do we need to support versioning so multiple rule versions can co-exist? What types of rules do we want to be able to change without having to modify the application itself? There are lots of questions and opportunities for best practices to guide us.

Take for example pivot points- the attributes around which our business changes. In insurance, there are different rules for different states, so states are a pivot point. If you include this pivot point in the rules, you will be changing the rules often. Just because rules can be changed, doesn’t make it a good practice. A better practice is to use attributes on rules to handle change points. Changing attributes on relevant rules is simpler and more expedient than changing the rules.

What does all this mean? Good design practices still apply to business rules. We need to make the connections from the business goals through to implementation. We need to look to existing design practices for guidance, assess how business rules need to change or enhance these practices and be rigorous about their use.

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Social Media Marketing Tips from OMS

The 2010 Online Marketing Summit was recently held in Dallas. Take a look at a few of our social media learns from the conference.

Forget "Inbound or Outbound" Marketing Communications

During almost every session, "Forget inbound or outbound" was the mantra. The Big Idea is all about two-way dialogues that are relevant, local and compelling. Delivering your marketing message to the individual—not the demographic. "Personally Engaging + Emotionally Intelligent + Highly Interactive = Dramatic Customer Results," According to Ephor Group's Charles Bedard.

Leverage Web 2.0

Web 2.0, or the ability for users to generate content for you by interacting with your website, is the key for small and large businesses with anything resembling a content marketing strategy. If you're a smaller company, form a "content team" that adheres to an editorial calendar. However, don't expect them to do ALL the work. Leverage user generated content. Case in point, Amazon leverages its user to write most all of its book and product reviews. It would simply be impossible to hire experts to write a review of every book, CD and product.

Develop a Culture that can React Quickly

These days there are countless tools that allow you to monitor social media mentions, trends and analytics, but what can you do with all that real-time data if you can't react quickly and efficiently?

The trick is to develop a culture that allows for quick reactions that can ride a trend wave. Encourage employees to participate (personally) in social media discussions around your business and its activities. If you can weigh in on the trends surrounding your brand in a relevant, value-adding way in real-time, you're already weeks ahead of your competition.

Forget "Web Chat"

There was a time that being able to chat live with sales support staff during the buying decision was the epitome of a modern brand. These days, its reputation as a value adding service is completely shot. According to Patrick Bultema, web chat has "been polluted by call center mentality and over-scripting."

Save your breath–er–fingers.

Relevant Social Media Content:

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The 5 Second Focus Group

Traditional focus grouping, eye path mapping, and split tests are all valuable tools, but they're cumbersome, expensive and slow. Enter "FiveSecondTest.com."

Created by an Australian duo at Angry Monkeys, FiveSecondTest.com allows designers and developers the ability to run a fast (and mostly free) test on any new comp.

Let's face it, with fast approaching deadlines and unreasonable expectations resting on creative design and web development marketing activities, who has time for the traditional focus group, eye path mapping and A/B split test approach?

Take it for a spin yourself. Here's the test we set up for JDM's new homepage flash. It's good karma...

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The Halloween Consumer Spending Index

These days, the economy is far more scary than ghouls and goblins, but that didn't stop Americans from embracing the (expensive) delights of Halloween.

This year, U.S. adults spent about $5.77 billion to celebrating Halloween, according to the National Retail Federation, up from $5.07 billion in 2007. Who says cobwebs can't stimulate the economy?

That's good news in an otherwise grim economic outlook. The Commerce Department said last week that Gross Domestic Product, shrank by 0.3 percent in the third quarter, largely due to sharp declines in consumer spending. This leaves little doubt with economists that we're in a recession that may be long and deep.  However, on the heals of Halloween retailers are reporting far more treats than tricks.

Contrary to the grim picture economists are touting, the "Halloween Consumer Spending Index" seems to be up from last year which may signal, an albeit slow, domestic economic recovery.

NPR wrote a whole article last week, "In Tricky Economy, Halloween A Treat For Retailers."  We'll have to wait and see if the holiday spending spree carries over through the "golden quarter."

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I hate passwords

These days, it seems that everybody has some sort of online client portal they want to manage you through.  Currently, I'm maintaining a list of over 350 different usernames and passwords for all the various portals I'm supposed to be using.  Worse, my company has been working on a client portal too.  Et tu, JDM?!

So rather than bore you with all the features the new portal has, let me just mention my favorite—Auto-Login Links.

That's right; "Auto-Login Links" allow authorized myJDM users to login without entering a username or password.  Every message, notification or online invoice comes with a special link allowing users to arrive not just at the most relevant page on myJDM, but without even seeing the login screen.

The JDM nerds are all excited about the release, the security, the integration, the navigation—whatever.  I'm just excited that at least my company's portal is one less password every one of our clients has to remember.

Passwords are so last month!

Check out all the shiny new features of myJDM in our Shameless News release.

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Pitfalls and Lessons Learned of Business Rules Implementation - A Technical Perspective

Senior Artemis Alliance staff, drawing on their practical experience with what can go wrong from management, technical, and business analysis perspectives, provided insight into how and why business rules initiatives fail and strategies to assure the success of such initiatives.

by Krzysztof Karski, Artemis Senior Consultant

Significant technical pitfalls include failing to:

Architect the concept model at the beginning of the project. Manage change. Establish an overall design vision for the rules engine and repository at the beginning. Establish appropriate testing methodology. Understand the capabilities and limitations of the rules engine. Understand that rules are not ‘just’ code or a new way to write if…then statements.

Success Strategies
For the concept model:

Reduce change by having a well thought out and architected concept model. Have enough of a concept model architected so that future changes are additive, not structural.

For managing change:

Establish a communication process between teams that might affect the concept model. Ensure the external entity model and the concept model evolve in the same direction. Agree early on data types, data constraints etc. Preferred approach: Iterative.Iterate quickly and often.Communicate frequentlyIntegrate differences quickly and often Alternate strategy: Delay concept and entity model integration.Isolate concept model from external entity model churn.Figure out rules and concept model first, then figure out how to integrate with the external entity model.Get the concept model correct first and then figure out how to integrate it with external models.

For establishing an overall design for the rules engine:

Choose an organizational paradigm and follow through. Establish rule organization, naming and categorization standards. Establish a vision for evolving the repository. Architect for rule portability and compatibility across the repository by having a well thought out and architected concept model.

For testing:

Test early and often. Do not skip rule authoring steps including testing inside the rule authoring tool. Test in your environment first, not in application. Conduct quick, targeted testing.At minimum, set up quick and targeted smoke tests for your rules.Establish a reusable base of testing plumbing and base test data.Catch 80% of mistakes in the tool.Let the application testing strategy catch the remaining 20%. For best use of the rules engine:

Understand configuration options and their differences. Use wizards and auto generation techniques where possible. Use full tool set. Use the appropriate data types, built-in functions, etc. Understand your vendor’s work flow:Take full advantage of productivity aids by following the vendor’s rule authoring workflow.Understand the order of events when writing rules to avoid rework or unnecessary manual work.Use the rules engine for rules.Rule engines are not integration, data transformation or translation platforms.You should not have to write a ton of rules just to access, understand and return data. For understanding why rules are not ‘just’ code:

Use intermediary concepts.Define intermediary concepts globally and reuse them.Define simplification concepts that are used in everyday conversation and use them in the rules.Revisit OO analysis fundamentals and apply them.Write rules that sound like English. Follow rule writing best practices.Have each rule deal with one issue.Break up large decision logic blocks into many rules.Don’t write techie rules.Remember that rules are just not a different way to express if….then expressions.

View the original article here

Context sensitive Rule Management

In my 15 years of IT experience, I have visited quite a few companies. Every company attempted, to some degree, to document business process in the form of rules. At the beginning, everyone is over enthusiastic and starts writing every detail as a business rule. At this stage, when a new rule is added, majority of BA's will not look into whether new rule would contradict with existing rules. This is starting point for contradictory / conflicting rules documents. Worst of all, at the corporate level, these initiatives happen in parallel and each department starts documenting rules whenever something comes to mind. IT builds applications based on a set of business rules which develop themselves into a concrete process with an input and output. An individual business rule is always a statement or a fact in the process, but can never be a process by itself. IT builds an application for a set of business rules which are cohesive in nature and accomplish a goal. This means that BAs should start from business PROCESS, not from RULES. After all, a business is a set of well defined processes/services to its consumers. Addressing rules from a process-centric viewpoint gives rules a context. Then BAs can ask themselves questions such as “How many processes are defined?”, “What portion of a process is defined?” Definition of a process can be expressed in business rules. Process-centric thinking while defining business rules has lots of advantages. It brings lots of new perspectives into the picture. In my next blog, I will take an example and explain how this process-centric thinking helps bring context to business rules. I will also explain the benefits BAs would gain by adopting this process-centric thinking.

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Marketers Not Using RSS Should Be Fired

Any marketer using an inbound content marketing strategy, but not RSS, should be fired." exclaims Justin Downey, Managing Director of JDM. "All you have to do is understand the basics to understand the immense value of RSS and that's what this most recent marketing best practice article sets out to accomplish."

The article, "Real Simple Syndication (RSS) Simplified," tackles the following topics:

What is an RSS Feed?How does it fit into the Marketing Mix?How do I generate my RSS Feed?RSS/XML Syntax & ExamplesHow do I promote my RSS Feed?

Learn more and register to download our latest best practice article on our resources page, Bathroom Reading.

See the release on our Shameless News Media Center: 'Anyone Not Using RSS Should Be Fired', Says Downey :: Shameless News

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Reebok's Soft Ad Strategy

Reebok's "Pick Me" commercials, where real, professional athletes showcase impossible feats in order to pitch themselves as good Fantasy Football picks, is certainly entertaining. However, as common in B2C marketing, the strategy of the ad campaign is soft (if it exists at all). What are they actually selling?

Very cool, but is the ad strategy successful? Your move.

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Google’s New Anti-Link Spam Algorithm

Inbound links generally signal to search engines that the site being linked to must have some credibility and, perhaps, should be rewarded with a higher page rank. After all, it's very difficult to make a significant number of people link to you. They must be doing it because they believe you have some real value to offer—unless it's Link Spam.

Link Spam takes advantage of these link-based ranking algorithms using all sorts of black-hat techniques like Link Farms, Hidden Links, Spam Blogs, Page Hijacking, Cookie Stuffing, etc.

It's been rumored around the net for months that Google is working on a cure for Link Spam and on March 3rd, Google's Matt Cutts posted a blog asking for users to report link spamming directly to Google.

You might be wondering why Google would resort to snitch-tactics...? We believe it's because Google has a new Link Spam-fighting algorithm and they're looking for a significant sample size to test it against.

Recently, JDM began testing a service called "WhoLinksToMe" to begin researching the SEO value-for-effort of building a reputable inbound link portfolio for clients and monitoring it closely.

As the following table shows, inbound links are about quality not just quantity. We're expecting Google's new Link Spam algorithm to simply exaggerate this fact.

Hopefully my mother is right and cheaters never win.

More SEO News & Best Practices:

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Aim Small, Miss Small

I've never been much for hunting, but I do like target shooting. A friend of mine taught me to "aim small, miss small." In other words, aim for the whole beer can and you might miss it entirely. Aim for the hole in the "g" on the label and, even if you miss the letter, you'll still hit the can.

"Aim small, miss small" also applies to B2B direct marketing.

Most direct marketers play the numbers game and send their generic message to anyone they think might have even the remotest interest in the message. Then they're surprised when unqualified responses trickle in.

If you "aim small" and develop a small, but highly targeted list, a highly relevant message and drive them to equally relevant content, response rates will drastically increase.

I know what you're thinking: small list = few responses (even with a high response rate)—and you're right. The key is your targeted message can only "miss small." You can't get too far off-base if you're speaking to a very select group of prospects the way you can when you're speaking to an entire demographic.

"Aim small, miss small" is the motto of evolved direct marketers who demand the highest quality responses at a price that will generate a positive ROIm. It also spells trouble for beer cans.

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Don't Penalize Payment!

On the first day of my very first pricing class in college, the professor opened with the following one-line statement: "Never make it hard for customers to give you money!"  The point was simple.  Get as sophisticated as you like setting up pricing structures, but for god's sake, don't make it hard to actually pay.  So why do so many businesses not just make it hard to pay them, but actually charge a penalty if you don’t pay them in the manner they prefer?!

I recently found an unpaid bill under the stacks of paperwork on my desk.  It was due in just a few days, so rather than chance it, I decided to call the automated payment line and pay via their check-by-phone service.  To my surprise, they wanted to charge an additional $12!  I have to pay more to pay on time?!

I'd understand if I was speaking with a human, but this was a totally automated system—not a human for miles.  The service only costs the business a few cents, so where does the extra $12 go?

Business owners, it's a bad idea to make it difficult for customers to pay you.  It's even worst to penalize them for paying you via an instant payment method.  That said, how do they get away with this?  The answer is exactly what that same professor said at the end of the last day of class: "...in the end, something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.”  As long as customers are willing to pay $12 to pay their bill, those businesses will keep up their Gotcha Marketing strategy.

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Why do so few companies actually manage their business rules?

The products and services offered by today’s modern companies are increasingly virtual constructs modeled and defined through business rules and enforced by automated computer systems. Insurance policies, lending agreements and other financial products are often essentially contractual agreements between a provider and a consumer. These products and services amount to risk mitigation or behavior governance strategies to produce a financially beneficial outcome to the provider while offering something of value to the consumer. Such contractual agreements are really nothing other than a product or service modeled through the use of business rules and resulting actions, which combined, govern the relationship and responsibilities of both the provider and consumer.

Products and services that are defined through business rules force the creation of additional business rules that govern the company’s operations. Activities such as billing, fee and rewards calculation, verification of eligibility, and compliance require that a new, but related, set of business rules be put in place which both support and constrain daily operations to ensure that the terms of the agreement are met. In addition, most companies must comply with federal and state regulations, resulting in another set of business rules that must be enforced.

Through all of this, we can see how business rules lie at the foundation of modern business, from being the actual product or service itself, to governing the necessary supporting operations that make adhering to the agreement possible while also complying with regulations. Executing, enforcing and complying with ever more complex and numerous business rules is, increasingly, becoming the business.

Interestingly enough, very few companies actually document and actively manage their business rules as the intellectual property, legal commitment, or competitive advantage they are. A business rules management approach, at a minimum, provides us with knowledge about what the rules are, where they are, and what the overall impact of a business rule change will be. Business rule management is not necessarily the centrally controlled or bureaucratic process it appears to be. However, scattering business rules and their documentation across the enterprise in use cases, requirements management tools, manuals, and -- most often – in code, does not a business rules management approach make.

So, given the importance business rules play in the modern enterprise, why do so few companies actually manage their business rules?

Here are a few high-level business reasons that I could think of for this lack of management, in no particular order:
Business rules have only recently become recognized as key company assets.Although rule engines have existed for over 20 years, business rule management tools and methodologies are still in their infancy.Only in the last 10-20 years has the business and regulatory landscape, products, and services become so complex that a rules management strategy is becoming essential.Since business rules change so often, old rules go away, and new ones are created, companies treat them as throwaways rather than as assets that need management.Companies are overwhelmed managing other aspects of their business that were positioned as critical much earlier than business rules (i.e., BPM, CRM, ERP, Just in time XYZ etc.). Companies have seen so many past promises about management approaches and technology evaporate that they are reluctant to adopt new trends until they have been proven by others.Managers are not around long enough to see value or implement long term strategies.Companies generally do not take an overall view of their business which means efforts are departmentalized and large efforts uncoordinated.Companies do not realize the savings from retaining and maintaining their intellectual property such as the expertise embodied in their employees. IT shops are unfamiliar with rule engines so anything related to rules management is equally unfamiliar.There simply hasn’t been enough hype around business rules for most managers to notice.

Naturally, it is too simplistic to say companies do not manage their rules. Insurance companies have been forced for years to manage rules to some extent due to mandated state filings on changes and proposed coverage. Similarly, companies who regularly audit their business activities must be able to prove certain practices are in place and business conducted according to regulations.

In that case, why aren’t companies managing most of their rules the same way they manage some of their rules?

View the original article here

Pitfalls and Lessons Learned of Business Rules Implementation - A Management Perspective

Senior Artemis Alliance staff, drawing on their practical experience with what can go wrong from management, technical, and business analysis perspectives, provided insight into how and why business rules initiatives fail and strategies to assure the success of such initiatives.

by Michael Krouze, Artemis CTO

Significant management pitfalls include:

Management sees the initiative as ‘only’ a technical investment or enabler, and fails to take into account ALL of the costs involved.Management views business rules as a tactical, single application investment, and does not see the ‘big picture’, strategic benefits.
Management hasn’t bought into the value of business rules, and fails to provide consistent support.Management does not understand the scope of the initiative and short changes the investment.

Success Strategies
Regarding determining the costs:

Clearly analyze all rule costs and communicate to management.Make sure to include the following types of costs:PurchasesCulture/process changeEducationImplementationTestingMaintenance

Regarding the strategic benefits:

Examine all the benefits of business rules.Think of business rules as a strategic tool.IT agilityManagement of knowledge as an assetLeverage the investment in tools and skills.

Regarding management support:

Educate, review competition, review success statistics to build confidence.Communicate strong support.Don’t vacillate – make a decision and stand behind it.

Regarding not short changing the investment:

Understand the costs.Recognize needs for education and/or consulting support.Allow for proof-of-concept work and learning curve.Contract for support services from vendor.

Based on Michael’s experience, shortchanging the investment and viewing a business rules initiative only as a short-term, tactical investment are the two biggest barriers to a successful project. Management must understand that a business rules initiative is strategic in nature and represents a new way to manage its business.

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"How to SEO for Bing" SEO Article

JDM has certainly discussed SEO before in articles, white papers and blogs. Nonetheless, the question comes up in conference call after conference call: "How is Bing different in terms of SEO?" To address this question, JDM has just published a new SEO best practice article, "How to SEO for Bing."

Fundamentally, Bing isn't that much different than other search engines. In fact, according to Bing's Principal Group Program Manager, "SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn't change that. Bing's new user interface (UI) design simply adds new opportunities..."

JDM's "How to SEO for Bing" article tackles a few key ways to capitalize on those 'new opportunities' they mention.

Learn more about this and other SEO articles on our Bathroom Reading resource page.

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That's Marketing...

On countless occasions, professional marketers find ourselves explaining not just what we do, but what marketing, in general, is.

I like to use the following explanation—especially after a few cocktails. Feel free to use it yourself. It's not trademarked...

You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, I'm fantastic in bed.You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says, He's fantastic in bed.You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day you call and say, Hi, I'm fantastic in bed.You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink. You open the door for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her a ride, and then say, "By the way, I'm fantastic in bed."You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says, "I hear you're fantastic in bed."

Well, I hope that helps anyone out there having trouble explaining marketing activities to friends and family. I have a few more for Social Media, Online, etc., but they're a little too racy for a corporate blog—even JDM's.

Stay tuned to @MarketingEvolve on Twitter for a few others too scandalous for Big Marketing Ideas. Got one of your own? Comment them below.

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