Building a Digital Workplace with WordPress

Alex Sirota - Director - NewPath Consulting

Who is Alex Sirota?

My company, NewPath Consulting, provides technology advice, services and

training to educate and enable small businesses to optimize business activities

using the cloud.

Our mission is to streamline your sales, marketing and business operations with

simple to use yet highly effective software solutions at an affordable monthly

subscription fee. We provide technology advice, services and training that

enable small business growth and transformation into digital workplaces.

Alex is a frequent speaker at various events and conferences aimed at small

businesses. Alex organizes the WordPress Group Meetup | North Toronto

Edition.

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Agenda

● Why is a digital workplace important for your business and your work?

● How does WordPress fit into a digital workplace platform?

● What are some example digital workplaces?

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Paradigm Shift in (Big) Business● Customers (and employees) are generating and

consuming content and information like never before. And they don’t “behave.”

● Businesses are are managing people, assets and content in new ways, making the customer experience the focus of transformation.

● Existing business models are disrupted by new business models and cloud-enabled, mobile-friendly technology platforms.

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What is a digital workplace?

● Enables both the business and the individual

● Transformative with respect to the business model and how individuals work

● Requires one or more software platforms which can be integrated using web services enabling the digital workplace.

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What is a digital workplace?

A digital workplace can be facilitated with tools and web services from the following major categories:

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● Commerce & Sales● Data● Management & Operations

● Advertising & Promotion

● Content & Experience● Social & Relationships

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1200 dpi zoomable chart from Chiefmartec

What is a digital workplace?

Characteristics include:

● Work happens any place, any time on any device

● Highly relationship-centric

● Your business’ information is portable by design

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Why is a digital workplace important for your business?

● Automate and standardize key business processes with inexpensive, easy to use digital tools and web services

● Your team, business partners and customers can work better together with improved collaboration capabilities.

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Why is a digital workplace important for your business?● Improve decision-making with on-demand, real-time data

instead of data that is hard to use or is out of date, uncertain assumptions and plain old guessing

● Reduce cost of doing business and increase productivity due to less manual labour and more flexibility of work conditions (less travel)

● Respond and pivot to market forces due to increased business and technical agility

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So how does WordPress fit...

● What is WordPress and how is it used

● Why WordPress is an ideal platform for building digital workplaces

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What is WordPress?

● WordPress is a free, open-source web software you can install & use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app.

● Can be used to publish, promote and sell as well as manage pretty much any business process

● WordPress lives in the Content & Experience / CMS & Web Experience Management section.

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NOTE: WordPress.com does not support plugins. Move.wordpress.com is a step-by-step migration guide.

www.wordpress.org/showcase - WordPress powers 25% of all websites.

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What makes WordPress an ideal digital workplace platform?● Makes it easy to to author, organize, manage and publish

content

● Maintained and enhanced by a virtual army of volunteer and commercial developers who work on “WordPress core”, plugins and themes

● Capable of integrating a vast array of business services via a REST API

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A bit about APIs

● Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a critical element of the Internet. It’s how web apps communicate and send events and data between each other.

● “JavaScript and API-driven interfaces are the future of WordPress.” (Matt Mullenweg, WordCamp US Dec 2015)

● The WordPress REST APIs enables WordPress to be developed and configured into a digital workplace.

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Let’s look at how WordPress can address the marketing technology landscape...

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The Marketing Technology Landscape

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Advertising & Promotion

Mobile Marketing

Display & Programmatic Advertising

Search & Social Advertising

Native/Content Advertising

Video Advertising

Print

Public Relations

Content & Experience

Mobile Apps

Video Marketing

Interactive Content

Email Marketing

Content Marketing

Optimization, Personalization & Testing

DAM & MRM (Digital Asset Management & Marketing Resource Management)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Marketing Automation & Campaign/Lead Management

CMS & Web Experience Management

Social & Relationships

Call Analytics

ABM

Events, Meetings and Webinars

Social Media Marketing & Monitoring

Advocacy, Loyalty & Referrals

Influencers

Community & Reviews

Feedback & Chat

Customer Experience, Service & Success

CRM

Commerce & Sales

Retail & Proximity Marketing

Channel, Partner & Local Marketing

Sales Automation, Enablement & Intelligence

Affiliate Marketing & Management

Ecommerce Marketing

Ecommerce Platforms & Carts

Data

Audience/ Market Data & Data Enhancement

Marketing Analytics, Performance & Attribution

Mobile & Web Analytics

Dashboards & Data Visualization

Business/Customer Intelligence & Data Science

iPaaS, Cloud/Data Integration & Tag Management

DMP (Data Management Platform)Predictive Analytics

Customer Data Platforms

Management

Talent Management

Product Management

Budgeting & Finance

Collaboration

Projects & Workflow

Agile & Lean Management

Vendor Analysis

Advertising & Promotion

● Ad Rotate : run your own custom advertising system with either your ads or ads placed by 3rd party ad systems

● CoSchedule : a marketing planning tool that organizes and integrates the promotion and scheduling of content to social media networks

● Yoast SEO : create content aimed at your customers and prospects, optimized for search engine ranking

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Content & Experience

● Gravity Forms : a commercial WordPress plugin for building interactive content such as quizzes, contests, etc

● The Events Calendar : manage online and offline events including selling registrations

● WordPress theme library : design with over 10,000 free and commercial themes for your WordPress website

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Social & Relationships● WP-discourse : use Discourse, an open source

community forum to engage customers, partners, employees online

● Eventbrite API : display Eventbrite events right in your WordPress site. Developers get easy-to-use tools for creating powerful, in-depth Eventbrite integrations

● 30 of the best “membership” plugins : a list of 30 WordPress plugins that enable customers to buy online subscriptions and memberships for goods and services

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Commerce & Sales

● WooCommerce : a free eCommerce toolkit enabling online stores and logistics associated with selling (inventory, tax, shipping, etc)

● Give WP : provides you with powerful features that help your raise more funds for your cause

● Formstack : a commercial forms builder that builds CMS-agnostic interactive forms for lead generation, sales automation and e-commerce (WordPress plugin)

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Data● Google Analytics Spreadsheet Addon : makes it easier for

Google Analytics users to access, visualize, share, and manipulate their data in Google Spreadsheets

● TeaCup Analytics : make sense of Google Analytics and truly understand your website visitors by asking questions and setting achievement goals

● TablePress : display, edit and calculate data in a tabular format

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Management

● Trello : a free, flexible, and visual way to organize anything with anyone; GravityForms can be used to populate Trello from a WordPress site

● Managed WordPress from GoDaddy : install and maintain one to hundreds of WordPress sites with automatic daily backups/restore and staging/production workflows

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A Real-World Digital Workplace

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Resa’s Pieces Digital Workplace

Results

The popularity of the organization, with the support of the website,

attracted CBC Radio which produced an award winning

documentary about Resa's Pieces that aired in July 2010.

By 2012, the organization added 30 new musicians and sold over

800 concert tickets online. In 2016, the organization has 150+

members and over 1000 concert tickets to the 3 annual gala

concerts are sold online. An average of 10,000 visitors come to the

website every year.

Online fundraising through event ticket sales and sponsorships

brings in 90+% of the organization's revenues and an annual

growth rate of 20%.

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Major steps to transformation1. Recognize the paradigm shift happening from business

models to the modernization of software as a service

2. Rethink and iterate your organization’s business model

3. Create a strategy embraced by whole organization

4. Develop agile processes and implement new capabilities

5. Measure & analyze outcomes, then refine business model

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LearningPlanningDesignOrchestrationMarketing

NewPath Consulting Plans● Bronze Plan - Towards a Digital Workplace

○ add marketing/transactional capabilities to online presence

● Silver plan - Basic Digital Workplace○ review business model

○ extend marketing/transactional capabilities

○ introduce 2-3 tools to support business model

● Gold plan - Full Digital Workplace○ review and iterate business model

○ extend marketing/transactional capabilities

○ introduce 3-6 tools to support new business model

○ introduce CRM functionality and business intelligence dashboard

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Training, Advice and Guidance

● A key component of our services is curation of the tools and services, alignment to business model objectives plus implementation and ongoing support services.

● All plans include 28 hours of training up front over 5 days.

● Training available separately and can be optionally financed with the Canada Ontario Jobs Grant program.

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5 Day Training Agenda

LearningPlanningDesignOrchestrationMarketing

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Thank you for your time and attention.

What is the biggest business challenge you face?

We can help with a free 30-minute consulting session.

Go to www.NewPathConsulting.com/30minutes to request your free consultation.

info@newpathconsulting.com or (888) 781-2539

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Resa’s Pieces Metrics