Social Media Exchange materials now online

As I mentioned in my previous post, in a few hours (must…sleep…) I’ll be running a couple of sessions at the Social Media Exchange.

I’ve now finished my slides, and have put them up on slideshare. Rather than make your life easy, though, I’m forcing you over to my posts on the Social Media Exchange site to get at them:

Would be good to have people’s thought on these in the comments over there!

Social reporting and learning at the Social Media Exchange

Tomorrow I will be hanging out with loads of cool people at the Social Media Exchange, which has been marvelously organised by Jude Habib and Mark Ellis at sounddelivery.

I’m helping out by running a couple of sessions, but also by lending my social reporting/learning WordPress theme, which I have spent today tweaking and filling with content ahead of tomorrow’s event.

The whole schedule has been added to the site as blog posts, so you can track who is presenting what and when by clicking the links on the schedule and speaker pages.

Sadly the home page dashbaord is bereft of live Twitter and Blogsearch updates as the server the site is hosted on didn’t seem to like pulling content in rom elsewhere with RSS. But there are links out, which people should be able to find easily enough.

One thing I am looking forward to is the amount of video that will be going on, thanks to Matt Waring and his team at Best Before TV, who are helping to cover the event with their VideoBoo package, which turns any Mac into a portable VideoBoo(th). We’ll get as much as we can embbed on the blog.

My two sessions are WordPress for Good, described as a masterclass (which means I get to talk a bit) and the other a surgery on blogging (which means I answer questions). I’ll be putting any slides and other media output up on the Social Media Exchange site as and when it gets created – just check out my tag page.

(Other great sessions (amongst many others!) will be those from my good friends Nick Booth and Steve Bridger.)

Of course, I did create the WordPress for Good microsite to house plenty of resources that people could use after they have been suitably inspired by my usual combination of mania and enthusiasm for all things WP. Thanks to all the stuff people have suggested, I’ve got plenty to be getting on with. Another late night, then…

Making WordPress into a CMS

As I mentioned earlier, I am going to be running some workshops at the Social Media Exchange, organised by Sound Delivery next month on the topic of ‘WordPress for good’.

The aim of the sessions will be to demonstrate how you can develop a really strong web presence quickly and cheaply using WP – not just as a blog but also as a CMS, to run a small but more traditional looking website.

This is possible due to WordPress’ ability to have static pages as well as blog posts, but more importantly in its amazing flexibility in terms of themes and plugins.

To try and be as helpful as possible, I am building a site to provide some resources for anyone wanting to build a site for their organisation using WordPress – it’s at http://wordpressforgood.com but there isn’t much there at the moment.

I’d like to make sure that I get as much material up there as I can before the event, so that those attending who get suitably enthused have something to get their teeth into straight away.

I’d really like to know what your favourite WordPress-as-a-CMS themes and plugins are so that I can add them to the site – and give you credit too, of course! There are a number of ways you could do this:

Thanks in advance for any pointers you can provide!