Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

I spent this past weekend at WordCamp Boston. If you use (or want to use) WordPress, this event the best use of $20 and 14 hours of your time you will ever spend. The event was well organized, the speakers were dynamic and interesting, and the presentations were instructive and inspirational. As is always the case with a well run conference, its value is equal parts information and motivation. And therein lies the rub…

The agony: So much great information, but my head is swimming with possibilities.
The ecstasy:  I have a plan and a blueprint.

While this blog post is – in part – a review of WordCamp, there is also plenty of good stuff that applies to internet marketing regardless of the platform you’re using. In other words, don’t stop reading if you’re not a WordPress user.

One last note: There were three simultaneous tracks running so, obviously, this is my review of the 1/3 of the conference that I saw. I’m sure there was other excellent content and fabulous speakers.

Big Picture: Strategy

A number of presentations covered planning and strategy. As Christopher Penn mentioned in his presentation, “The strategy of, ‘If you build it, they will come‘ only worked for, like, the first five blogs on the Internet.” If you want readers for your blog, and if you want your blog to actually accomplish something, you need a plan.

Don’t Be a Tool

My award for Cleverest Title goes to John Eckman, who had the audacity to suggest that WordPress may not be the best solution for every website. His point was that, too often we select a tool first and then try to shoehorn our strategy into that paradigm. In a humorous and briskly moving presentation, he chronicled the potential pitfalls of selecting a CMS (content management system) and presented five strategies for getting the CMS decision right; business, technology, content, engagement and optimization. Developing these before deciding on the tool will help ensure that everything is aligned.

You can view his presentation on Slideshare: Don’t be a Tool: Content Management Strategy

Now What?

My favorite presentation of the conference, “How to Market Your Blog (okay, Mom’s reading, now what?)” by Chris Penn gets my award for Best Presentation. I would have paid the $20 and sat in the horrible I-93 traffic just to see this presentation. At the end of his talk, he said “Well, there you go. Eight weeks of marketing education in forty minutes.” And he wasn’t wrong. Chris broke his talk down into three categories; grand strategy (why?), strategy (what?) and tactics (how?). Using a mind-map to illustrate the relationship of the dozens of topics he covered, the presentation was fun and informative.

You can download his mind-map here: How to Market Your WordPress Blog

Inbound Marketing

There was no way I was going to write a review of WordCamp and leave this out, right? The talented and vivacious Karen Rubin gets my Energizer Bunny award for the presentation with the highest energy. Karen delivered an overview of how to implement inbound marketing on your blog with a nice balance of strategy and tactics. Being a certified inbound marketing professional myself, much of it was review but I still took away several helpful tips and nuggets. One that I intend to investigate is the Hubspot for WordPress plugin she mentioned. It has some badges and a call to action feature that looks helpful.

Karen’s presentation isn’t online yet, but hopefully it will get posted to her talk on SpeakerRate: WordPress & Inbound Marketing: How to Generate Leads With Your WordPress Blog

Tactics

Most of the presentations I saw fell into the category of tactics (as opposed to strategy) and there was no shortage of tips, tricks and advice here.

Security

D.K. Smith grabs my Head-Slap award for the most sobering wake up call in the conference. He revealed some basic best practices everyone should follow in order to put in place a baseline of security that will protect from script kiddies and basic malware. With regard to plugins, he advises that you keep it simple and use these three: Login LockDown, WordPress Firewall 2, and WP Intrusion (could not find a link). Other suggestions include using secure FTP, configuring long passwords and blocking folder indexing using the htaccess file.

Custom Post Types

K. Adam White receives my Rookie of the Year award for his presentation, Stepping Into Custom Post Types. He is a natural at presenting and seemed really comfortable for his first ever presentation. The information was well organized and helpful. While these tactics were obviously quite specific to WordPress, the concept of extending a CMS and making it your own is worth considering. Using custom post types is a way to automate content creation and organize it in a way that makes it easier to develop and maintain.

Check out his presentation on Slideshare: Stepping Into Custom Post Types

Convert or Go Home

Last, but by no means least, my Can I Get an Amen! award goes to Ross Beyeler’s presentation on conversion. With all of the inbound marketing evaluations I perform, the lowest score is consistently conversion. It’s something that is either not done well or completely ignored by an overwhelming number of websites. Ross did a nice job in presenting conversion from a designer’s standpoint and suggested five principles for designing for conversion;  audience segmentation, clear messaging, building trust, targeted offerings and clear calls to action.

Check out Ross’s presentation on Slideshare: Converting the Crowd

If anyone else has a review of WordCamp Boston 2011, feel free to leave a link in the comments and I will add it to the body of this post.

Updates:

From FirstTracks Marketing: WordCamp Boston 2011 Review

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Your 2011 Primer.” This week’s links take a look at some tips and trends to help get strategically prepared for 2011.

#5: Maybe next year…

Let’s get started with a quick pep talk from Seth Godin. “It’s not too late, it’s just later than it was.”

Link: Seth’s Blog

#4: 10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption

In reading this article, I am reminded of Clay Shirky’s theorem of technology’s impact on society: “These tools don’t get socially interesting until they become technologically boring.”

Link: RIA Journal

#3: 10 Business Models That Rocked 2010

What struck me in reading this article was how many of these models had been attempted before. It’s probably equally worthwhile to examine how these implementations succeeded when predecessors failed.

Link: TechCrunch

#2: Blogging Forefather Seeks to Re-Invent Blogging, Again

Dave Winer, inventor of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), is very concerned about silos. So he’s doing something about. “The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure… You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place.”

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?

At this time last year, Google seemed unstoppable: so much so, that many of the news stories and blog posts were questioning whether or not they were too powerful and even advocating a Google-free existence. Just a year later, many experts are questioning whether or not they are in real trouble.

Link: TechCrunch

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Change: Get on Board or Get Run Over.”

#5: Cooks Source Copyright Infringement Becomes an Internet Meme

Speaking of getting run over…  This western New England publication became social media road kill for two reasons.  First, they were quite obviously and brazenly stealing others’ work.  But that alone did not do them in. What really spelled their demise was wanton and arrogant disregard for the power of social media. End result: splat!

Link: Wired Threat Level

#4: U.S. News & World Report All but Quits Print

Here’s a story about a company who decided to get on the bus a split second before getting run over. It remains to be seen whether or not they’ll be thrown back off but at least they’ve seen the writing on the (Facebook) wall.

Link: AdAge

#3: WordPress.com becomes a domain name registrar

The most popular post on this blog is “Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress,” which provides a detailed plan for configuring a WordPress blog to act as your personal online homing beacon. I’ve been giving more and more talks about Personal Inbound Marketing lately, and my very strong advice for people is to register their own personal domain and use it for a WordPress blog. Previously, this required two steps using two different companies. Now, you can do it all at WordPress.com. It’s still not the preferred route (I’ll explain why in a future blog post), but it’s great for people who are not very Internet literate.

Link: Domain Incite

#2: Old Media Beware: Blogs Rely on Cleverer Tech, Leverage Social Media, Making Bloggers More Money

Blogging isn’t the story here; it’s democratization. The Internet and its Web 2.0 applications are obliterating barriers to entry in lots of markets. Journalism is one of the first, but if you’ve been following Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, you know that product development and manufacturing are one of the new frontiers.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Of SEO And Spaghetti Sauce

This isn’t just about SEO. The important message is that asking people what they want is a mistake more often than not. When you’re developing products, this is a huge challenge but when you’re developing web sites it’s a huge opportunity. For example, if you had conducted a massive consumer marketing survey in 2000 that asked Sony Walkman users what features and design elements were missing so that you could build a new, innovative device, the last product you would have come up with is an iPod. As the web site iPod History says, “At first, the reactions were confused and hostile, critics lambasted the $400 price tag, the unconventional scroll wheel and the lack of Windows compatibility. Despite all this, the iPod sold beyond everyone’s expectations, went on to revolutionize the entire music industry, and the rest is history.”

The point is that innovation is pretty risky when you’re talking about product development. It generally takes lots of money to get a new product to market. But with web sites, the risk is much lower and the tail is much longer. Be specific and make sure you offer plenty of flavors.

Link: search engine land

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I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).

Today I’m commenting on the current plague of companies looking to enslave college students and recent graduates in order to help them establish a presence in social media.

I subscribe to multiple Craigslist RSS feeds and every single day there is at least one advertisement from a company looking to bring in unpaid interns for various jobs.  Many of them are mundane, computer-oriented tasks but many of them look just like this one:

Do you tweet, blog and use social media like Facebook all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the event industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its’ social media campaign.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of social media; Facebook, Twitter, Blogging Platforms. Have exceptional writing skills. Proficient in MAC and Basic HTML. A passion for weddings is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Aside from the spelling errors and poor grammar, what’s so bad about this?

Crime Doesn’t Pay

That’s right, if your internship doesn’t meet six federal legal criteria you are violating federal labor laws.  Many employers mistakenly think that they can hire unpaid interns because they are providing enough value through the experience the interns gain.  However, this is the wrong perspective. They need to consider whether or not the person materially provides value to the company.  If so, they must be paid.  If not, why are you wasting everyone’s time?

Hobbyist Vs. Professional

Let’s try rewriting the advertisement listed above using a different profession and see how it may turn out…

Norm Abram is the seemingly superhuman master craftsman who has hosted the PBS television show, "The New Yankee Workshop" for some 20 years.

Do you caulk, paint and watch television programs like the New Yankee Workshop and This Old House all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the construction industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its residential construction business.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of construction; hammers, nails, saws. Have exceptional painting skills. Proficient driving Fords and Chevys. A passion for subdivisions is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Sounds absurd, no?  Just because a person knows how to use a hammer or circular saw doesn’t mean they know how to build a load-bearing wall, right?  And watching Norm Abram every weekend for two years doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build a ten foot Clancy sailboat from scratch.  Knowing how to use tools does not mean that a person understands how to design, finance, construct, and sell a home.

Well, just because a student posts pictures of friends’ compromising antics on Facebook and has a few thousand followers on Twitter doesn’t mean they understand how to effectively architect, implement, and measure a social media marketing campaign.  That’s even assuming that the business already understands how the social media marketing strategy will fit into its overall marketing strategy, but they frequently do not.

What’s the Harm?

Here is a short list of some of the missteps that can lead to more harm than good:

• It is possible to attract the wrong audience. The first rule of search optimization is, “do no harm.”
• Blogging carries legal responsibilities including copyright infringement and Federal Trade Commission regulations.
• Facebook’s Terms of Use are complicated and even contradictory. Violating them can get you banned.
• Anything worth doing is worth measuring. Fan and follower counts do not tell the story.
• Creating compelling, engaging content is challenging and dynamic.
• Hope is not a strategy.

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Inbound marketing begins with creating content, optimizing it for search, and promoting it via social media.  Blogging is the Queen Mother of content platforms, but many companies are more intimidated by it than they probably should be.  Frequently, they focus on the task of creating original content. While this is certainly critical, it’s not the only type of content that can be leveraged.  Most organizations generate lots of other content that can be re-purposed.

That’s where the concept of a “content conveyor belt” can help.  This presentation introduces the idea and explains its advantages and how to set one up.

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