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?

1. Building a Digital
Workplace with
WordPress
Alex Sirota - Director - NewPath Consulting

2. 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.
2

3. 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?
3

4. 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.
4

5. 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.
5

6. What is a digital workplace?
A digital workplace can be facilitated with tools and web
services from the following major categories:
6
● Commerce & Sales
● Data
● Management & Operations
● Advertising & Promotion
● Content & Experience
● Social & Relationships

7. 7
1200 dpi zoomable chart from Chiefmartec

8. 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
8

9. 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.
9

10. 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
10

11. So how does WordPress fit...
● What is WordPress and how is it used
● Why WordPress is an ideal platform for building digital
workplaces
11

12. 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.
12
NOTE: WordPress.com does not support plugins. Move.wordpress.com is a
step-by-step migration guide.

13. www.wordpress.org/showcase - WordPress powers 25% of all websites.
13

14. 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
14

15. 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.
15

16. Let’s look at how WordPress can
address the marketing technology
landscape...
16

17. The Marketing Technology Landscape
17
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

18. 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
18

19. 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
19

20. 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
20

21. 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)
21

22. 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
22

23. 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
23

24. A Real-World Digital Workplace
24

25. Resa’s Pieces Digital Workplace

26. 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%.
26

27. Major steps to transformation
1. 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
27
Learning
Planning
Design
Orchestration
Marketing

28. 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
28

29. 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.
29
5 Day Training Agenda
Learning
Planning
Design
Orchestration
Marketing

30. 30
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

31. 31
Resa’s Pieces
Metrics