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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Don't be a social media lemming.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Get 300 followers per day on Twitter!”

We all have, and I’ve heard this and other similar enticements in just the last couple of days.  This topic has been covered ad nauseum by every social media and marketing blogger out there, but apparently the message isn’t getting out.

So here is one more shot…

Metric vs. Strategy

Measuring is a good thing – provided, of course, you’re measuring the right metrics.  The number fans on your Facebook fan page, or followers on Twitter, or subscribers to your blog are all important metrics that (indirectly) measure the reach of your message.  But they are not a strategy!

Getting additional followers on the social media channels is relatively easy, but what is the point?  Many businesses hold the mistaken assumption that more followers will somehow equal more business.  All it equals is more opportunity for business, but you need to have a plan to turn those opportunities into customers.  The real question is how many of those fans/friends/followers will convert?  What reason are you giving them to convert?  How are you tracking your conversion rate?  That’s what inbound marketing is all about.

Inbound Marketing

If you combine a large number of followers/friends/fans with an effective inbound marketing infrastructure, then you’re in business.  But building a large following without it is putting the cart before the horse.  Here is a basic outline of what inbound marketing entails:

1. Create compelling content. Which is easier said than done for many people.  Creating remarkable content in the digital age requires some competency in four skills: webapprentice, designer, storyteller, and marketer.
2. Optimize it for search. Inbound links are by far the most important factor for search engine optimization, which is why #1 is extremely important.  But it is also important to understand the basics of on-page optimization in order to maximize the visibility of your content to search engines.
3. Share it with others. This is where your large following can start to pay off.  Once you’re creating compelling content, share it through your social media channels in order to drive traffic back to your web site.
4. Create calls to action. Once the traffic is flowing into your web site, it’s important to have clear, prominent calls to action.  Make the visitor some sort of offer that gives them value in exchange for their contact information.
5. Nurture your leads. Ideally, your leads would be entered into some form of database or customer relationship management system so that you can follow up appropriately and move them through the buying cycle.  Cull them when necessary.
6. Convert your leads. That’s what it’s all about – convert leads to prospects, and prospects to customers.
7. Measure. You need to be measuring all of this activity every step of the way.  Understand where your traffic sources are and which ones are the most/least effective.  Compare those against your conversion rates and use the data to optimize your efficiency and scrap ineffective strategies.

Having 100 extremely engaged followers is far more valuable than 1,000 who are not paying attention.  And even if those 1,000 are paying attention, without an effective strategy for converting that asset into business you’re just wasting your time.

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To web, or not to web, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in business to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous consultant costs or to take arms against a sea of technological doubts, and by opposing, end them.

Since recently becoming active in the LinkedIn question and answer section, I’ve seen no fewer than four questions in the span of one week asking “Do small companies need a website?” and various derivatives thereof. Most of them were asked by incredulous marketing consultants who obviously run into prospects and clients who do not have one and/or don’t feel they are necessary. My $0.02 = they are as necessary as business cards, only cheaper!

Why!? Why!?
Before a discussion of exactly how quick, easy, and inexpensive it is to get a web site up and running, I can hear the “professionals” tearing clothing and ripping hair from their skulls as they scream, “Noooooo! But what about x, y, and z?!?!” Where x, y, and z represent any web design or marketing catch phrase you care to insert. I even saw one designer advise a small business owner to make sure that any designer they select does not use tables for web page layout, or they would be sorry! While there is sound theory behind this advice, it is precisely the sort of technological hyperbole and cart-before-the-horse advice that paralyzes small business owners. My short answer is, “All in due course.” But let’s get this beast domesticated right now with a little more detailed answer…

Stage 1: The Online Business Card
That sounds pretty simple, right? In this stage you expect no more from your website than you would from a business card; your company’s contact information and logo along with a quick blurb about what you do and/or what your mission is. The key thing about a business card is the “leave behind” aspect; that you can give it to someone for them to reference later on. Browser bookmarks are the Internet equivalent in this case. If I want to remember your company for some reason, I’ll slap a bookmark to your website in the appropriate category.

Stage 2: The Online Advertisement