Marketing is not Business is not Marketing

I just discovered something interesting: Technorati seems to believe that this site is about marketing. If you go and have a look at the tags generated for my blog, you will see that "marketing" shows up as one of the tags. What's especially odd is that, until right now, as I write this, I have never once used the word "marketing", nor have I linked to any marketing related site. Just the fact that I appear to be writing about business seemed, to Technorati, that I would inevitably evolve into a discussion of marketing.

This seems to be a bit of a microcosm, as apparently all the "business" blogs are really "marketing" blogs -- that is, they seem to describe how to market your business. Furthermore, in my industry there seems to be a massive focus on marketing, and less on the other aspects of business: customer service, project management, product management (seen at my company as a function of marketing), people management, profitability...

Undoubtedly marketing is a huge part of business, but it is only one part. I hope that writing this blog will help me to understand business more thoroughly and help me to clear my thoughts regarding business. Of course, I will from time to time speak about marketing but I would hesitate to call this a marketing blog.

My hope with this blog is to take a high-level look at the business of being a business to business service provider (an application service provider and data integration specialist, in my current incarnation) and attempt to understand how the pieces should fit together and muse about how to optimize the puzzle. Perhaps this hyper-focus of marketing is a symptom.

I have no shortage of ideas (I have, right now, 5 posts in draft, and this only after a couple of days of having the blog active). What I do have is a shortage of time. I still suffer from a shortage of experience as well. I'll bet that the last condition will solve itself in time, and I would hope that anyone with experience or hubris who stumbles here feels welcome to contribute.