WP Engine co-founder Jason Cohen on the embrace of WordPress by the Enterprise.
It’s interesting to watch the Enterprise world grab ahold of WordPress.
In some respects they’re rediscovering the things we’ve known for years. For example, how anyone in the marketing department can make changes, create new landing pages, earn a loyal following, and so on. WordPress makes all this possible with less technical effort than before.
But there are other factors unique to the Enterprise, and that’s where their adoption of WordPress gets even more interesting.
Historically, the enterprise Marketing Department (with a capital ‘M’ and ‘D’!) has been hamstrung by proprietary and static tools, and been at the mercy of the IT Department (more capital letters!) to decide what technology to use or make changes to the system. And if you’re a technical service provider, you know that when you read “proprietary,” “Enterprise,” and “Departments,” you should also think “expensive.”
WordPress changes all that. WordPress can be hosted outside the company’s firewall, because it doesn’t hold any company secrets. That means simultaneously skipping the tyrannical IT department and saving money. Then, with those same benefits, the Marketing Department can create landing pages, run A/B tests, and easily publish a stream of content that feeds their various social media efforts. They can still have their departmental requirements with multiple users being able to edit, review, publish, and configure the system, but you can do all that without a PhD in PHP.
On top of that, 23,000 plugins make it easy to integrate with a plethora of tools and services that the Marketing Department always wanted to use but that couldn’t be shoe-horned into closed, old-school systems. Google Analytics, KISS Metrics, Clicky, SnapEngage, and hundreds of other tools are literally just a few clicks away from the plugin repository.
Finally, for special customization and to build enterprise-grade solutions, there are more WordPress design and development firms than ever before, like WebDevStudios, Human Made, and 10up. These firms provide the white-glove treatment the enterprise is accustomed to from top-tier marketing agencies, but on a platform that they can actually understand, control, and use. Freely.
To those of us outside the world of Enterprise Marketing, it can be hard to appreciate just how liberating this is. The freedom that WordPress creates extends not just to the millions of individuals who now have a voice on the Internet, but also those historically shackled to bureaucracy and politics.
Enterprise marketing departments are figuring this out right now, and thinking about WordPress not just as a way to “have a website that Marketing can edit without opening a Change Request with IT,” but rather as a focal point of their brand’s existence.
We’re excited to see what they come up with on the platform.
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