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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