Cory Miller asks the question we all should help answer.

Posted on by PressNomics

HOW DO WE KEEP GOING FAR TOGETHER?

It’s been a great week at Pressnomics and from every single person of the 150+ people I’ve talked about it, it was an absolute hit. (Thanks to Josh and Sally Strebel and the Pagely gang and sponsors and participants for making it happen.)

In a word, this week has been EPIC.

Very rarely have I had the opportunity to attend an event and say, “I want to meet and talk with all of them.” And that sentiment has been expressed numerous times here.

I’m totally exhausted … but it was worth every minute. And sitting here relaxing (finally) and downloading all I’ve heard and witnessed in the last two or three days, I’ve been consumed with how we keep this momentum and energy going. 

I have four questions (maybe challenges) for those of us in attendance:

1. How do we keep conversations going and growing?

Being in the same room for two days as 150 of your peers is a rare event. How do we stay connected to each other once we get back home and busy again?

Schedule a once a month or quarter Skyle call? Start a private forum? What ideas do you have and who will step up to lead it?

I’ll tell you right here that you could stop reading and just answer this one because the next three questions relate directly back to this one.

If we don’t stay in touch, we’ll lose some momentum, which is OK I guess … but I think the start of something great began here and it’d be a waste if we squandered an opportunity.

2. How do we keep learning from each other?

Again, related to staying in contact with each other in between Pressnomics. But talking with people after the sessions, the speakers provoked conversations and sharing afterward that went deeper.

In particular I enjoyed hearing the stories — both the success and failures and why they happened.

So how do we share the best practices to build our businesses together? And what trends are you seeing in your business and with WordPress?

Garth Koyle from Event Espresso has an excellent idea to do anonymous surveys for benchmarks of what we’re doing.

3. What one thing will you takeaway from this week and apply next week in your business?

It’s all about application. Otherwise, a year from now, we’ll simply say, we got together, had some good talks, met some good people but beyond that, it was a nice time in beautiful Chandler because I didn’t do anything different.

So if this event was a win for you – what has it changed and how are you going to implement it?

This is about next steps and action … also called implementation.

4. What are ways we can collaborate more?

Mark Jaquith challenged us to find collaboration opportunities between companies and people. This is a tough one as we are all focused on building our businesses and our competitive tendencies come into play but I’m eager to hear other people’s thoughts and ideas on it.

5. Where is WordPress going and how do help it keep going farther?

Some of my most productive time here was simply hearing answers to that question.

The fact is … WordPress changed all of our lives. I heard numerous stories of this that were deeply personal and special.

***

So that’s the questions I have for you … post your ideas and action items in the comments and let’s keep the momentum going. – Cory Miller

9 thoughts on “Cory Miller asks the question we all should help answer.”

  1. Thank you so much for the excellent post. You’re right. We need to keep the momentum going and we’ll try to continue to stimulate the WP commercial entities.

    1. We have created http://on.pressnomics.com where business entities can share knowledge. We believe that you only get what you give. Should we do a monthly meeting? Sure.. I could set it up. We have to be conscientious of timezones since we have a global need.

    2. Before Gangplank and Page.ly, Josh invited our web firm competitors to discuss best business practices. Our competitors were shocked with how much information we shared enabling them to do a better job. Then they started sharing too. We raised the bar. Insert Gangplank. I think that we could do this in relation to WP. Perhaps during our monthly meeting we have set topics where individual companies set the stage. I think the first topic should be setting the rules. Also, I’d like to hear more about Garth’s idea. Sounds interesting.

    3. I’ll take away gratitude and faith from Pressnomics and continue to apply it to our business. We have wonderful friends and mentors and I feel so blessed that they shared their knowledge during their presentations. I’ll have faith that if we wanted to, we could do Pressnomics again. I’ll also have faith that people will see that we are good people who care greatly about everyone’s success.

    4. Ways to collaborate more…. We don’t all want the same things and we may all do something different with the same information. We are all on our own path. Ask a room of 100 people to draw an apple and I guarantee that no ones apple will look the same. So, for the monthly meeting, perhaps when we set the rules, we include no malicious intent.

    5. How do we make WP stronger? We work together.

    -Sally Strebel

    Reply

  2. 1. How do we keep conversations going and growing?

    I recommend finding someone in the industry you like, and if possible in your niche, and doing a phone call every month, every 3 months, or something so you can stay in touch. Just sit down for an hour and just chat about the industry, problems you are having, things you see etc. I do that with a few people in the hosting industry and it’s a fantastic way to share ideas. Too many people get hung up on the idea that sharing is bad in business, when in fact it usually helps everyone involved.

    Apart from that I think a small forum focused on the topic of the conf might be good. We just started YangPress.com (http://www.yangpress.com/) to work towards building a community that teaches others how to build a business from WordPress. It just went live and we have some exciting things coming down the pipe.
    *A deliciously shameless plug.

    2. How do we keep learning from each other?

    Write write write, its a great way to share and it helps your own mind think over the subject. I highly recommend case studies, pick out a problem you have and write about it internally as you solve it, then release that study once it is solved and notify sites like wpcandy, on.pressnomics, yangpress, and others about it. Who knows, you might even be doing a talk on it by the time a future Pressnomics rolls around?

    3. What one thing will you takeaway from this week and apply next week in your business?

    Skipping this one, we have a lot of things coming down the pipe long term, short term it’s mostly about being open to opportunities.

    4. What are ways we can collaborate more?

    Back to #2 I’m a big fan of writing out your thoughts, and the WP meetups are always a great way to encourage other people and find people to talk too.

    5. Where is WordPress going and how do help it keep going farther?

    Just keep at it and make sure to express your opinion! I see too many people in the WP community shy away from expressing their opinions for fear of backlash because they think they might be off the official “track”. Everyone needs to remember that this is a big community and every opinion can move that track if it makes sense.

    Thanks, Ben

    Reply

  3. I had an awesome time. Meeting people I lurk on but never met. It was a welcomed initiative, really. Kudos.

    1. How do we keep conversations going and growing?

    On http://on.pressnomics.com/

    2. How do we keep learning from each other?

    Ask participants to write on http://on.pressnomics.com/

    Siobhan is a great writer for that. And there are others…

    3. What one thing will you takeaway from this week and apply next week in your business?

    CFO. We need a proper one.

    4. What are ways we can collaborate more?

    Ask Pippin to write on that on http://on.pressnomics.com/ 🙂

    Reply
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  7. A little late to the party again, but here it goes…

    1. How do we keep conversations going and growing?

    I think a mailing list would be great. After Twitter, email probably has the lowest friction to reply. I would love to see conversations happening over an email list and I’m happy to setup a Google Group to get it going. Just need a few people to agree that this is a good idea.

    I wouldn’t be opposed to getting together on Google+ Hangout or something similar once a month or something.

    2. How do we keep learning from each other?

    http://on.pressnomics.com/
    Blog, tweet, and post to that email list.

    3. What one thing will you takeaway from this week and apply next week in your business?

    Spend more time on vision.

    4. What are ways we can collaborate more?

    Required plugins. I think this is at least part of what Mark Jaquith was getting at in his talk. I’d like to see themes stripped down to just designs and require certain plugins rather than baking in a ton of functionality into the theme that already exists (e.g. sliders). And not just their own plugins, but plugins from other companies. This is already happening a bit, but from the conversations, I think we’re going to see this kind of collaboration a lot more. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see a lot more theme shops offering free themes but requiring paid plugins.

    Social coding. Those of us on GitHub who have experienced forking and pull requests are yearning for this in the WP community. Many of us have already moved our code to GitHub and are simply replicating to SVN (see Scribu’s scripts) and linking to the GitHub repo from our plugins .org page. This is far from ideal and we need a solution before this becomes further fragmented and confusing. Personally, I’d like to be able to specify a link to the primary repo where the code is hosted, be it GitHub, Bitbucket, Beanstalk, SVN on .org, or wherever. We’d still push code to SVN on .org for review. Downloads would still come out of SVN on .org, but at least other developers would know where the primary repo can be found, commented on, and contributed to.

    5. Where is WordPress going and how do we help it keep going farther?

    I think WP has a healthy business ecosystem, but it still has a ways to go to be good experience for customers. It’s still hard for customers to separate the bad products from the good. There is no go to source for ratings and reviews for paid themes/plugins. Further, with required plugins in free themes, the purchase process becomes more complicated for the user if it isn’t handled seamlessly. These are some of the things we’re working on fixing with WP App Store.

    Reply

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