This post is part of an ongoing series called “Ask Living the Path.” With more than 
1,000 blog posts, news articles, data summaries, strategy guides and case studies, our knowledge-based online community, Living the Path, is packed with content that will help you stay informed. In this series we demonstrate how the site can help you answer common strategic and tactical questions. Those using Living the Path for this purpose can refer to the wiki and the social news site, the NewsHub.
In case you have not heard, there is a bit of a semantic battle going on between social marketers and those using social media for marketing and communications purposes. During the past few years, social media marketers have begun to use the term “social marketing” to describe what they do. In one sense describing social media marketing this way makes sense. On the other, it leads to great confusion, as social marketing is a decades-old communications discipline focusing on fostering social and behavioral change. In addition, as I argued in this blog post, words matter and social marketing confusion has real policy and financial implications.
So, if I were interested in answering this question, how could Living the Path help me? Well, first I would visit the wiki and type the the keyword “social marketing” into the search box. (Using quotation marks around your search term will increase the relevance of the results.) The number one search result is an article titled “What is Social Marketing?” The article describes social marketing as the use of “techniques developed and refined by commercial marketers to ’sell’ healthy behaviors to children and adults around the world. . . . The primary purpose of social marketing is to achieve a ’social good.’ This generally involves achieving long-term and measurable changes in attitudes and behaviors.”
This article also features nine references to online content focusing on social marketing.
A Case Study is Worth Three Thousand Words
I believe that social marketers are having semantic difficulties partly because it is hard for people to understand — at a visceral — level, what social marketing is all about. This is why case studies are so important, as they teach people what solid social marketing initiatives look like.
Fortunately, the Living the Path wiki has a number of social marketing-related case studies. By typing in the search phrase “social maketing” case study into the wiki’s search engine, I find a number of interesting ones. Some of these include:
- Beeping-Based Mobile Social Marketing Campaign Encourages HIV Education, Testing in South Africa
- The VERB Campaign
Moving on the the Living the Path social news site, the NewsHub, we find that there are a number of blog posts focusing on social marketing. On the left side of the NewsHub’s home page, there is a tag cloud listing which topics are most popular on the NewsHub. At the bottom right, we find the term “social marketing.” Clicking on this link brings up a three-page listing of blog posts that primarly focus on, or are connected to, social marketing.
Closing Thoughts
As you can see there are many resources available to you on Living the Path on this and other topics. If you have a question, it’s likely Living the Path has answers.
Tip: To quickly search the NewsHub, wiki or other areas of Living the Path, download our browser toolbar.
In the next installment we’ll answer the question: How are minority groups in the U.S. really using the Internet?
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