We often hear the question: What corporate social media sites use Wordpress?
After all- It is free open source software. It is often followed with questions like: Who would use free software to run a significant corporate site? Lets take a look at a few…

Big Media Sites

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• CNN

Companies you may have heard of:

• General Motors
• Ford
• Reuters

Some governmental sites:

• Library of Congress
• NASA
• United States Post Office

The list goes on and on.

As a media platform Wordpress has revolutionized the way information can be rapidly syndicated across the internet. This transformation is due to several main reasons:

1. Wordpress is a widely popular blogging platform- In 2007 it had 3,816,965 downloads.
2. It is user friendly (and becoming friendlier) - For business usage, Wordpress has the ability to become more intensive or scaled back for user education. The visual interface for administrators can be customized for any user level, and the visual design for visitors can be altered to serve any brand need. A pivotal feature of the admin side of Wordpress is its “Office-like” user interface that allows anyone who can muster sending e-mails or editing a Word document the ability to make a site change.
3. It is scalable- Wordpress can be hosted through Wordpress.com for free or downloaded and installed on nearly any web server. Small business users can run popular sites off virtual hosting services, while full 100k+ user sites can easily be managed on dedicated servers. In addition to Wordpress single user, there is also Wordpress MU (multi user) that allows thousands of blog platforms to interact or form a community.
4. It has an almost unlimited support group of developers. As of 8/30/08, they have contributed 2,809 plugins that have been downloaded over 11 million times. Each plugin represents anything from a single new feature (such as extra e-mail functionality) or robust applications that manage intensive functionality. The cost in labor-hours for the development expertise that is freely given by community developers often exceeds thousands of dollars.
   
5. It has unequaled customization and design options. There are thousands of free visual templates that allow Wordpress to fit nearly any business need, as well as hundred of premium templates that include extra functionality and visual appeal. Under the Wordpress platform, a site can maintain an unlimited number of static pages or use the systems dynamic properties to manage information.
6. It doesn’t tie companies to excessive licensing restrictions. Per Wordpress- “Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.”
7. It offers data security. Wordpress is based on a fairly simple database design that is governed by multiple levels of user permissions (i.e. you can define what different people can see) and dozens of plugins allow for monitoring how users interact with the data, where they came from, where they go, and how they can control other users on the platform.
8. Wordpress is based on the social web. This is an important point. Wordpress is constantly being enhanced and modified by thousands of different individuals and businesses every day. Those interactions constantly develop niche application that integrate with other web platforms and applications like YouTube, Twitter, Google, Flickr, Linkedin, Digg, Stumbleupon, OpenSocial, etc. This mutual development from other platform users creates unique mash-up functionalities.

123 Social Media is based off the Wordpress platform and we fully endorse it as a business tool for many of our own projects. We run into many projects that utilize complex proprietary content management systems that have less than half the features and present more technical hurdles than they do solutions. If you have questions about the capabilities of Wordpress, add some commentary below or contact us.