By Myra Norton on 2/19/2008 6:28 PM

Greetings!

It is with excitement and a little bit of trepidation that I write my first blog post. The whole idea of writing this post seems counter-intuitive to me – I am much more comfortable responding to questions or ideas rather than posing them. So, I suppose my hope for this first post is that it will spur questions and ideas from all of you, and that we can begin a conversation from which we all can learn.

In the months of preparation for the launch of this website, all of us at Community Analytics spent a lot of time talking about messaging and language, images and aesthetics – what face would we present to the rest of the world? The truth that came to us in that process is that we were asking the wrong question – the question is not, “What do we want to say?” The question is, “Who are we?” – it’s a question of identity. What you see on this site is a reflection of our identity – the principles we believe in and the philosophies we live by.

Doesn’t that seem a little backwards? Aren’t marketing messages (and let’s be honest, that is what a company’s website is – a conglomeration of marketing messages) supposed to speak to what the audience wants to hear? In fact, here is the definition of marketing from Wikipedia:

Marketing is a societal process that is needed to discern consumers' wants; focusing on a product/service to those wants, and to mold the consumers toward the products/services.

In trying to reconcile the commonly accepted definition of marketing with our approach to this website, I realized something that is at the core of what we believe: If you have a genuine relationship with the community you are trying to serve through your products and services and if you seek to meet the needs of that community on their terms, then articulating who you are and staying true to that identity is all the “marketing” you need.
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By Katie McClammer on 2/7/2008 7:41 AM

By Katie McClammer on 2/1/2008 7:47 AM

Myra Norton Offers Hope to Businesses Who Want to Quantify Value in Social Networks

 

Baltimore, February 2008 — Community Analytics’ Chief, Myra Norton was consulted for the BtoB Magazine article, Social networks starting to click. Written by BtoB’s own, Rebekah Tsadik, the article focuses on the rapid growth of social networking in the business-to-business marketplace. Tsadik notes the need for marketers to quantify the value of social networking in a way that is relevant to an organization’s strategy.

Tsadik asserts that “b-to-b companies are borrowing social networking ideas from the b-to-c space while creating measurements and tactics to fit their own needs.” A joint survey by the Association of National Advertisers and BtoB last year showed that b-to-b marketers utilize social networks for brand-building and awareness.

 

 

 

Decision-makers use relationships to filter product and vendor information when making purchasing decisions. While some businesses assume they must go online to have conversations with these decision-makers and their connections, Norton argued that these relationships already exist offline. “In the business world, relationships that already exist offline may be nurtured through online social networks,” said Tsadik. Norton continued, “There’s a lot of value there because those sites are providing a platform that allows a dialogue and the relationships that happen between people to happen faster.”

 

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