Social Media Marketing Blog

Hello and welcome to the primary category for our little blog. Under this category you can expect to find articles, news and information from around the web related to the topic of Social Media Marketing.

We will start things off with a definition of Social Media Marketing;

Social Marketing was “born” as a discipline in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman realised that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to “sell” ideas, attitudes and behaviors. Kotler and Andreasen define social marketing as “differing from other areas of marketing only with respect to the objectives of the marketer and his or her organisation. Social marketing seeks to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society.”

Social Media Marketing is a term that has become popular since the emergence of “WEB 2.0″ and social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and many others. SMM combines the goals of internet marketing with the techniques of leveraging social media sites to the advantage of a marketing campaign.

Most online communities don’t welcome traditional direct or hard sell techniques so an effective SMM campaign will require more finesse to execute properly. SMM campaigns must be targeted to the community you want to reach with a message that appeals to them. Some common ways of achieving this are with authoritative information, entertainment, humor or controversy.

SMM is related to other online marketing such as Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, Viral Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing, and Social Media Optimisation. Many believe Social Media Optimisation (SMO) takes a passive role in establishing the framework for different social sites to connect themselves. Others feel SMO is taking the principles of SEO and applying them to social websites. SMM takes a more active planned role directing, influencing or suggesting community members create and connect the content.

While many would use SMM to boost their own company brand or ideas, due to the open nature of many social sites, it can also be used to create and promote a negative point of view. Many companies have found SMM to bring too much negative publicity. An interesting example of the power of blogging and social sites is the now infamous “link bombing” campaign that lead to the number one search result for a search on “miserable failure” in the search engines being the whitehouse profile for George W. Bush. Google has since “defused” this situation, however at the time of writing, a search on Yahoo! still shows the results.

We will write more about the above mentioned sites, as well as others, and dive into the modes ad methods of Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimisation in future posts.