<rant>
ContentRobot touts ourselves as “the blogging and WordPress experts.” We are committed to the WordPress platform and exclusively recommend it to our clients. So, it was very painful to see the huge presence of rival Six Apart at BlogWorld Expo and a very tiny (and even surly contingent!) of WordPress.
To us, WordPress has a superior blogging platform, so why were they not at blogging’s biggest event of the year? One guess is that they are concentrating on their developers and they’d rather spend their energies at participating at the various WordCamps instead.
In contrast, the SA team had a big part in the opening keynote (in fairness, Matt Mullenweg keynoted last year) and set the stage for what blogging is and what it means to them. Then, who’s booth was first as you entered the expo floor? Needless to say Six Apart’s area was big, very well “manned,” and they were more than ready to help.
So ready, in fact, that our buddies in the Newstex booth (who were next door) told us that they heard repeated stories about how easy it would be to convert bloggers to a more “secure platform.” In stealth mode, we decided to see what they had to say – luckily for WordPress, their story didn’t go much beyond that SA is less hackable. We were not convinced – sorry, Andy Wibbles! – but it gave us a bad taste in our mouths anyway.
When we finally found the WordPress team, they were just part of a small booth. Worse, they put forth an unhappy WordPress.com team (and believe us we were not the only ones who felt that they were uninviting and uninspiring). Thanks for the stickers, pins, and tattoos, but we could have been better cheerleaders for WP.
In fact, we were! We twittered that our team was there to help assist anyone having and WordPress questions or issues. The WordPress.com team followed us with a similar tweet, but we don’t know how effective it really was.
Another overt WordPress fan – Lorelle VanFossen in the adjoining Woopra booth – was encouraging visitors to tell their “we love WordPress” stories and getting it all on video. This is just the kind of involvement and excitement WP needs to elicit and sustain.
Automattic, please go to BlogWorld next year – show off how great your software and solutions really are. You have tons of loyal users (including ContentRobot) that would be happy to help you with a booth, twittering, or whatever you need to showcase, highlight, or support the WordPress platform.
</rant>