At WordCampNZ I was planning to talk about what I do most of the time which is online marketing projects integrated with WordPress.
On the day I talked more about the logistics around WordCamp rather than the stats & case studies I had planned to do.
My business is focussed at the marketing end of the scale and so I use email tools especially Campaign Monitor and MailChimp plus various other social media plugins to make it as easy as possible for customers and partners to engage with each other.
Again not having enough time (or sleep) I mentioned these WordPress plugins in passing.
This is the partly the presentation that I had planned but on the day it seemed more important to go wider and talk about WordCampNZ future planning.
- Google Analyticator is one of my favourite plugins as it gives a rolling 30 day view of GA on the WordPress dashboard. This saves going into the google account which not many of my customers want to do. The plugin has role settings and so that desktop widget can be rolled down to below admin and editors if that is what you want to do.
- FB Like is Facebook like plugin that we use on WordcampNZ. I like it (sorry about the pun.) Much as I personally have mixed views about Facebook (privacy & commerce) there is no doubting the huge clout it has when someone that you know likes or comments on stuff we all care about. (see also my post from June 06 Trust & verify on trust cues.)
- Backtype Connect is another plugin that is used extensively to feed in the twitter and other social streams into blogs. Part of the reason we use it is that it provides some twitter analytics which is a growing area of interest for many businesses. Have a look at these analytics for the post on Richard Hollingnum.The other reason I / we use Backtype is that some of the automattic people invested in it. (P.s you may need to setup a free account with Backtype if you can’t see the full set of stats)
- In passing I also referred to VaultPress for backups and VideoPress for video hosting also very much worth checking them out.
- WordPress Mobile Edition plugin from Alex King is one of my favourites. I don’t mind reading the instructions as there is a theme part and a plugin part. So this plugin needs a FTP whiz to do upload. Auto install won’t get the theme part in the right location.
The other point to remember with these kinds of lists is that plugin versions and WordPress versions are a moving target and do change.
This means that – as always there might be a particular combination of versions that may not work with your theme or other setup configuration.
Congrats to Bill Bennett for his piece on Writing for the web in 300 words one of my favourites and now I’ve just hit 482 so time to publish.
