I am looking for them and i can not see anything. I was actually looking for the list of the WordPress premium companies and now i remember that post! But now nothing :D

Speaking of word of mouth, me thinks Thesis wins. It doesn’t have to be in the list though.

I think someone said it above, but seriously every WP site or blog I go to, i always see some sort of Elegant Themes banner and he’s a pretty cool guy to offer what he does for the price he does.

Overall Woo has got it going as of right now, but who knows someone might come out of nowhere and give them a run for their money ;)

To say that, in asking people to come over and vote, he didn’t game the poll but, rather, promoted the poll itself, is like saying that the Taliban, in threatening to kill anyone who voted in Afghanistan, didn’t deliberately affect the election but, rather, intentionally discouraged the environmentally destructive use of ballot papers.

To say that his actions only resulted in a skew because the other companies failed to do the same thing is nuts. Are you seriously suggesting that our best designers should be wasting their time trying to rig polls instead of improving their themes and supporting their users?

There is, of course, a commercial gain in having a poll on an independent website that seems to suggest that WooThemes is ten times more trusted and liked than their nearest competitor. Don’t be surprised if you start to see this wonderful result mentioned in their publicity material. As Adii says, “why not promote yourself?”

But, no, it is not a big deal, I’m just calling it as I see it.

Did Adii intentionally game the poll? No, but he intentionally promoted it. It skewed the results because no one else did, thats all.

Did Woothemes gain more exposure from this? No, the people on WPTavern would mostly already be aware of them (or already become aware of them by seeing the name in the poll), and his Twitter followers already know about him/them.

Did Woothemes win some coveted prize? No, its just an unscientific poll on a blog like so many others that we all enjoy from time to time.

Did Adii do anything good? Yes, he delivered a whole bunch of traffic to WPTavern, some of whom may never have been here, and some of those might subscribe and stick around. Isn’t that nice?

Our marketing would suck balls if our products & after-sales service weren’t backing up that hype. So why not promote oneself!?

Yes, I agree that if you’ve got it you should flaunt it and, more importantly, when you’ve got other people working for or with you, you actually have a duty to flaunt it – within reason.

In Adii’s case, what he did by branding himself as the WordPress Rockstar was very astute. No doubt, other companies in the WordPress eco-system could learn a lot from WooThemes but I believe there are some things that push hype and promotion too far and, as such, are counter-productive.

For instance, why game an online poll so openly when you were already winning? Wasn’t it enough to have 17 votes when your nearest competitor had only 10? That was impressive. Suddenly pushing it to almost 100 is just ridiculous, buying you short-term hype at the cost of long-term credibility.