FireflyStream.com

There's growing confusion between the decades-old discipline called social marketing and the new concept of social media marketing.

Social marketing is the planning and implementation of programs designed to bring about social change using concepts from commercial marketing. Social marketing "products" are big ideas meant to change attitudes or behaviors, such as getting kids to stop smoking, protecting the environment or encouraging condom use. It's agenda-based marketing often driven by non-profits. It is a recognized marketing discipline that was popularized in the early 1970's by Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman.

Social media marketing is a new flavor of marketing that uses social media such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo groups, etc. to create communities of like-minded interests and, perhaps, interact and converse with customers and potential customers. Social media marketing doesn't work too well with an agenda, unless it springs from a collaborative, grassroots effort from inside the community. It was popularized by bloggers .

I've noticed numerous references on blogs and podcasts that mislabel social media marketing as simply social marketing, probably for reasons of shorthand.

Let's not shortchange the real social marketers who've been working hard for years to change the world by confusing the two disciplines with an incorrect shorthand.

UPDATE: Nedra Weinreich in the comments points us to her side-by-side comparison chart of the two disciplines.

Posted by Jackie Huba
Source: ChurchOfTheCustomer.com
Photo credit, SocialAuthority.ning.com