Slides from my MBA mini-lecture, 5 things you can do with your customers online, are here as promised. Offered as part of our USF MBA Kickoff week.
My advice for MBAs starting with social media? Try these simple tasks first:
- Set a google alert for a topic you care about (LISTENING)
- Comment on a corporate blog (CONVERSATION)
- Send a product evangelist email (EVANGELISM)
- Answer a question on an online forum (SELF-SUPPORT)
- Vote for a product idea online (CO-CREATION)
While WordCamp 2008 attendees were likely impressed with the huge number of page views (6.5 billion per year - roughly one for every person on the planet) and monthly unique visitors (up to 160 million per month) being racked up by wordpress.com, I was focused on a different number.
2,604,288. That’s the number of people running WordPress blogging software on their own websites, with their own web hosting. You’d think that only a hard-core techie fringe would choose to pay for their own web hosting, and deal with the geekiness of it all, when they can get WordPress for free on wordpress.com. But, as of this morning, 3,870,299 blogs were running on wordpress.com. That’s a close race.
In other words, the do-it-yourself web crowd is looking mainstream, not fringe.
The one-click install revolution on web hosts has made this possible. The amount of software/web services power at your disposal with today’s inexpensive web hosting is ridiculous. Take a look at a typical menu of open source software choices (this one is from Simple Scripts). Blogs, wikis, forums, serious content management, e-commerce, CRM…often the best software in its category. We know people are using install scripts, because of the growing number of blogs that are launching with slightly out-of-date versions of WordPress. (Script services are often behind the latest version, one of the downsides of using one-click installs vs. slapping it together by hand.)
Not all is perfect in one-click install land. Upgrades and backups are nowhere near as painless as getting started. But it’s been good enough to compete with free, and it keeps hope alive for a more open web future: not everything has to happen through Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even wordpress.com.
I’ve developed a teaching module that helps students start to create a simple business web site using WordPress. The students launch a new site on a web host via an install script, come up with a simple category structure, and download/upload a new theme.
As an example of a business WordPress site, I use nextbusnews.com. NextBus is the groovy technology that tells me real-time how late my next MUNI bus will be (more details on how NextBus uses WordPress as a simple content management system here).
It amazes me that only 36% of US small businesses with net access have a web site (as reported in the Wall St. Journal last week). This is 2008, not 1998!
Is there an opportunity for WordPress to become a kind of generic small business solution? Business sites can be done now, of course, with some tweaking and geeking. But, following the analogy from Stephen O’Grady’s talk at WordCamp on Saturday, perhaps someone needs to build a company on top of WordPress, in the same way that Google builds its services on top of open source software. A small business website service built with WordPress, but where 99% of the users don’t even know what WordPress is? Edublogs for small business, but maybe without even using the term ‘blog’? Is this a good idea? Is somebody doing this? In the meantime, we think there are lots of good reasons to teach students about open source business platforms and basic content management via WordPress.
(I’m going to wait on an official release of this teaching module until after I hear from reviewers at the WITS 2008 Technology Instruction in Business Curriculum Competition.)
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 