Plug-In Statistics, Marketing, and The WordPress Repository

Working through Kim Gjerstad’s 360-Degree Marketing Presentation for MailPoet at WordCamp Europe 2013, what’s becoming more and more apparent besides Kim’s candor is that data matters. And sure, statistics lie, but the MailPoet crew relies on statistics to gauge the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Most of us are not, after all, Yoast.

Uh-oh.

Data, the lifeblood of any company seeking to improve the performance of a product or service through marketing adjustments, is available in only the rawest form from the most important source of business/potential business available to a WordPress plug-in developer like MailPoet? And WordPress parent Automattic is aware they aren’t making useful data available to their partners and simultaneously ignorant as to why the data is useful? Is that even possible?

In the burgeoning WordPress community, an ecosystem that depends on the continuing collaborative involvement of its members, there are a few things that make the business models and business processes in play different than they have traditionally been, and examples of real business change. I pointed out one in the piece on Kim Gjerstad’s invoking Yoast, when I mentioned that bad players in the WordPress community find themselves branded as pariahs. This is a big deal; last year we acquired the domain name wordpresstraffic.com, planning to build out a service to help people using WordPress maximize their Search Engine Optimization efforts. Shortly thereafter we were approached by a large player in the WordPress Community about doing a joint venture, but that party absolutely refused to work with us if we used that domain — or even continued to own it — for no reason other than the state of WordPress Community ethos.

So has Kim Gjerstad pointed out an example of Automattic putting its needs ahead of those of its lifeblood, despite the community caring a whole bunch about Automattic?

Maybe, but I think not. Automattic is a relatively young company being run by relatively young people, with a lot of its work still being undertaken by — no kiddding — volunteers. And those volunteers do what they do both because they genuinely believe in WordPress and because they believe they can further their professional progress by being all warm and snugly with the mother ship.

It’s complete repudiation of the way business has always been done, and validation of the idea of coopetition. And MailPoet, rather than trying to resist business process change, has jumped right in. And it’s working.

Want to talk about how you can position your business to ride the wave of business process change, and stop swimming against that tide? I’m right here.