So I know that this is not a new subject, but I thought that since Pulse + Signal focuses on social marketing/health communications, I thought I would take some time to set the record straight here on the blog – especially after seeing the mistake made time and time again.
Two main differences right off the bat:
- Social Marketing is old
- Social Media Marketing is new
According to Wikipedia’s definition, the social marketing movement began in the late 1970s. Long before the Internet was made popular, long before there was AOL Instant Messenger and <gasp> decades before blogs and Twitter. Jackie Huba, of the Church of the Customer blog, pointed out last year the definition of social marketing and quickly followed it up with a definition of social media marketing. To make it easier to understand, let me take the most important chunk out of each definition to set them apart.
Social Marketing:
Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing along with other concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good. Social marketing can be applied to promote, for example, merit goods, make the society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote that considers society’s well being as a whole.
Social Media Marketing:
Social media marketing, on the other hand, is about building ways that fans of a brand or company can promote it themselves in multiple online social media venues.
Basically, social marketing is used for increasing healthy/positive behavior changes in society while social media marketing is about companies or individuals using social media to promote themselves or their brand. I think that sums it up about the differences…
Make sense? No? Well then check out my friend and mentor, Nedra Weinreich’s blog post (that has been updated a few times since its initial posting) which gives a side by side chart comparison on the differences between social marketing and social media marketing. I think this makes it as plain and simple as possible to see what makes each different.
For more individuals who are fighting the good fight in the social marketing world, feel free to check out:
- Craig Lefebvre: veteran pioneer and thought leader in social marketing, who is also quite tech savvy
- Alexandra Rampy: the Social Butterfly herself, part of the new generation of social marketers
- Mike Kujawski: Canadian social marketing dynamo, founder of the Centre for Excellence on Public Sector Marketing
- Mike Newton-Ward: fellow North Carolinian and passionate veteran in the social marketing world
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