Marketing Technology Blog

For the last couple months, I’ve been working on a top secret project that’s pretty fun. Webtrends is a client of mine who we’re assisting with reducing cost per lead, increasing conversion rates and improving online visibility (I know that’s generic… but these guys are in a highly competitive market!). With the high number of enterprise businesses utilizing WordPress, it made sense that Webtrends would provide an integrated offering… so we built it.

The Webtrends plugin isn’t just a crappy little plugin to add your analytics code to your footer – that would have been too easy. Instead, we brought Webtrends incredible analytics into the WordPress dashboard!

The project had it’s challenges! While Webtrends API is one of the best I’ve ever utilized (push a button in your Analytics app to get the API call!), trying to provide a unique user interface that matched WordPress was tough but I think we nailed it. There’s a settings page where you fill in your API details and select your account…. and you’re up and running!

The dashboard is also 100% Ajax driven to ensure pageload time are kept to a minimum. It was a joy to work through WordPress’ Ajax security model (a little sarcasm there, but I recognize the need to have a good one!).

Of course, the plugin adds the necessary footer JavaScript and noscript code (a huge advantage of Webtrends over free analytics is that you can still track folks with JavaScript turned off). It also brings back the pages that are the most popular, as well as Webtrends’ tweet stream, blog posts and support stream. Webtrends is moving to real-time functionality as well… this is great for Enterprise bloggers.

If you’re a Webtrends client and would like to beta test with us, please let me know. Your server will need to run PHP 5+ with the cURL library enabled so that the API calls can be retrieved! We’ll be talking more about the plugin at Engage 2010!

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Ole Laursen assisted the team as well. Ole to helped us properly integrate FLOT with the plugin. FLOT is an open-source jQuery based rich charting engine. I’m so sorry I forgot to mention Ole! He was wonderful to work with.

Utilizing a platform such as WordPress can have some advantages and some disadvantages. The recent release of WordPress tightened up some security issues and subsequently disabled a couple of plugins that I had written – the WordPress Contact Form and the PostPost plugin.

For companies that rely on open source, you’re at the mercy of the plugin developer. That’s a key disadvantage of utilizing an open source blogging platform versus a SaaS business blogging platform like Compendium Blogware.

For those of us in the WordPress development community who have built plugins, it’s important that we respond and correct issues as soon as possible. Many times, though, there’s no one to contact – no means to contact the person – and no means of warning others of the issue.

My recommendation to all WordPress (or other open source developers) is to implement an application like UserVoice. UserVoice is simple to install and provides your users (or even your readers) with a method to report bugs and recommend improvements. I’ve been soliciting feedback from users with UserVoice for blogging topics (overwhelmingly… you’re asking for blogging advice… I’m listening!). Click the red Feedback tab on the left to see it in action!

Aside from the wonderful feedback I’m getting, I also received a tip from one user that my site wasn’t rendering in IE8 well (I added the IE7 rendering meta tag tonight), as well as a bug report that my Contact Form plugin was broken. I was able to correct the issue, upload it, and resolve the issue for anyone tracking the bug. Very cool functionality!

A note on Compendium and Corporate Blogging: Please contact me if you’re a medium to large sized business and are interested in developing a blogging strategy. In August I will have my own agency contract and can bring you on board personally, supplying the attention you need to leverage your blogging across your entire online marketing program. Call me at 317.456.BLOG.

You may have noticed that I’ve been quiet this past week. It’s not from a lack of work, I’ve had quite a busy week!

One of the projects I’ve been working on this week has been a Wordpress Plugin that allows direct SMS integration with Connective Mobile. The plugin is quite robust, with both an administrative interface and an author interface. The admin interface allows you to manage the integration’s features. The author interface allows you to add subscribers and send out messages to your text club subscribers.

Connective Mobile Administrative Interface:

Features:

• Administrator level access only
• API Authentication
• Subscribe to comments (for the blog’s owner). Automatically filters out Akismet designated spam!
• Blog post alerts (to notify your subscribers when a post is published, compatible with Wordpress 2.6.1+)
• A form to manually add a subscriber.
• Get a count of subscribers.

Connective Mobile Author Interface:

Features:

• Author level or higher access
• Send a broadcast text message to your subscribers
• Shorten a URL (using is.gd) that you want to put in your text message
• Manually add a subscriber.
• Get a count of subscribers.

Connective Mobile has quite a robust API and I’ve been working with Adam there to both fine-tune the plugin and develop a great integration. Wordpress has grown quite a bit over the last year and is being used for a number of uses, including ecommerce, client support notifications, event management, etc. Adding the ability to subscribe by SMS is a pretty cool feature.

We’re going to test it on my blog and at The Bean Cup, a local coffee shop. The Bean Cup can use it for sending out lunch special alerts, new blog posts, and band announcements… and much more! If you’re interested in the plugin and the service, you can connect with Adam through their website. Be sure to mention my blog post, we’re working on coming up with a discount for my readers. We’d also like to add a few more test bloggers (service is limited to the US for now) that will give the service a workout.

The service is fully compliant with all carriers, requiring a double opt-in and opt-out options. You can opt-in by texting MTBLOG to 71813. You can opt-out by texting STOP MTBLOG to 71813.

NOTE: We’re not responsible for charges that your carrier may charge you for the text messages or data charges associated with them! This is totally beta right now (you should have been subscribed when it was alerting for all the SPAM comments!).

Each time I would test some ads on my site, I always had to reach into the theme designer and edit the core them code… something that gets me a little nervous. I’ve tested quite a few ad plugins for my Wordpress blog, but none of them were robust enough.

This week I finally found what I needed with a fantastic Wordpress ad management plugin, called Ad-minister.

The interface for Ad-minister isn’t too intuitive, but the features are perfect. Here are the steps to configure Ad-minister, check out the author’s site for additional details:

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Enter the necessary code in your theme, be sure to put great descriptions for the location – especially if you have quite a few regions:

   <?php $args = array('position' => 'Top banner', 'description' => 'This is the banner on top of every page', 'before' => '<div id="banner-top">', 'after' => '</div>'); do_action('ad-minister', $args); ?>

3. Go to your Manage tab and select Ad-minister.
4. Click the Positions/Widgets tab and you should now see all of the positions that you’ve added within your theme design.
5. Now click Create Content. Past your code, select the position where you’d like it to display and you’re off and running. Be sure to title the content enough to differentiate your ads.
6. You’re now off and running!

The plugin also has additional functionality such as date ranges, number of clicks, etc. It’s a very robust plugin that has everything you need to manage advertising easily on a Wordpress blog!