I am a professional WordPress consultant with 2 distinct companies;

Nautical Progressions:
a production company for hire available to all industries.

EPKhosting.com:
A web hosting company for Musicians.

Looking at your list of discussion topics, I’d like to offer my experience with WordPress as my bread and butter day in and day out. At a glance, here is what I can review for WordCamp;

1) WPMU – EPKhosting.com is powered by WordPress MU and tailored to compliment the needs of musicians… we have a multi-user blog called “The Ongoing Music Documentary” used as a sales hook for new members from social networks like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

2) E-Commerce Integration – I’m a very big fan of the Instinct Shopping cart plugin by Dan Milward, however I have run osCommerce and WHMCS parallel to WordPress within the same site/domain.

3) Branding – I have used WPMU on EPKhosting.com with customized branding and domain mapping to achieve higher page ranks by forcing members to login through our official site… even if they were to use their own domain; clientname.com/wp-login.php
The EPKhosting.com branding is right in their face… our logo is watermarked on all videos, login pages and other smo activities for the ultimate brand recognition. This has largely facilitated the success of our blog as an accredited music e-zine.

4) Idea generation for your blog: I have 2 great examples here… Nautical Progressions is a development company specialized in WordPress… every week a blog is posted reviewing a WordPress project we launch reviewing the plugins used in an attempt to cross-sell readers into buying the same service. It’s a better sell showing the reader an actual success story then pitching a power point presentation or something like that. The second example is EPKhosting.com… we’re targeting musicians and artists… we review the Rock Stars they look up to with video interviews and live music videos, and force feed a pop up ad on the video using the LongTail ad solution… this is a great low cost way of leveraging your blog’s content to cross-sell viewers into a different service that is related. The blog seeks to educate viewers on how to launch their music whereas the hosting service gives them a platform to present it.

5) My reputation for SEO preceeds any other skill I have, and I have never had such quick results with any CMS as I have with WordPress. The plugins available for WordPress simplify the process of SEO so that even a newbie can learn how to make progress without hiring the pros. My philosophy is to empower my clients with the knowledge and tools… not keep them in darkness in hopes of keeping them on a retainer.

Currently, I am working with 2 of the largest music companies in the country, i.e. Canadian Music Week and Metalworks… one of the custom plugins I’ve developing right now is a mashup of the WordPress GigPress plugin with Google Maps and Twitter. Picture a Google Map with all the venues that are part of the music festival plotted with colour coded markers (red means doors closed/over capacity – green means doors open) These markers are updated to red/green by tweeting a hash tag on Twitter.

So there you have, those are a few ideas I have off the top of my head. If not this year, perhaps I can present these “case studies” next year.

Yours truly,
CP