Building a Digital Workplace with WordPress

The cloud, mobile and social media developments have made the Internet into a vast and ever expanding bazaar of business automation and service capabilities. Where once we thought of the Internet as web sites, we now see it as a far more useful and complex landscape in which we live and work every day.

The most successful SMBs spend close to 10% of their annual revenue on digital technologies and are building high-performance digital workplaces. But most small businesses spend very little time or money on digital technologies— less than 1% of annual revenue.

In a digital workplace, the core business processes — management, marketing, sales, HR, accounting and operations — are automated to help deliver the business’s value proposition consistently, delighting customers and prospects in the process. Customers, employees and prospects have improved interactions with your business both from an external perspective — how customers and prospects find and interact with your business — as well as from an internal perspective — how your staff sell, market your products and services and run the business.

Think of a digital workplace as a private Internet running within the digital confines of your organization and consisting of a secure and massive repository of dynamic information pertaining to the organization and various group and individual work tools available to those working within it.

WordPress is a tool that has evolved into a key component of a digital workplace strategy working along side several small business friendly, cloud products that can help a small business compete more effectively and run more efficiently.

The most popular CMS in the world, WordPress, is an exemplary platform on which to build a digital workplace for your business for a number of reasons. With its tens of thousands of extensions, addons and themes and an army of inexpensive developers to customize it, WordPress is capable of integrating a vast array of business services and processes. Here are a few examples:

1. lead generation and management, CRM
2. event management
3. analytics, business intelligence
4. project management
5. every form of communication (voice, video, chat, social media, forums)

Presented by Alex Sirota and Robin Macrae:

Alex Sirota, Director of NewPath Consulting, is a pioneer in orchestrating cloud-based systems to meet the needs of small and medium sized business (SMBs). NewPath Consulting provides technology advice, services and training to educate and enable SMBs to optimize business activities through the cloud. Its curated and integrated suite of cloud-based products transform clients into more productive and profitable organizations.

Alex is an organizer of the Toronto WordPress Group Meetup and leads the Toronto WordPress Group Meetup | North Edition launched this month. He was a speaker at WordCamp 2015.

@alexsirota, @newpathtech, http://www.newpathconsulting.com/.

Robin Macrae works with NewPath in several roles. He is a content strategy and development consultant with a background in information architecture, content management, software development and marketing. He has been a thought leader in professional systems and digital work methodologies for many years. He has been a WordPress consultant and a member the Toronto WordPress Group Meetup since its inception in 2010 and a speaker at WordPress, SharePoint and content management events throughout North America.

@Robin_Macrae, https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinmacrae, http://workspacebuilders.com/