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Presently, social media marketing is a valuable tool in this digital age. Nonetheless,it still borders on concepts from traditional marketing. In regular marketing, marketing communications is very important in delivering clear messages to the audience as well as maintaining good publicity. The normal components of the promotional mix like public relations, direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, and other elements establish messages that customers would love to hear. In short, marketing communications is the coating to a hard sell. It also used to be costly to employ any one of those elements since most companies outsource the planning until the production of such services to third party like media relations firms and ad agencies. It’s a great thing though that the landscape of social media marketing has greatly changed since web 2.0 technologies came into being. Nonetheless, there are also some adjustments that has to be done when conducting social media marketing.

The term social media marketing is also known as social media optimization or SMO.SMO gives site owners the chance to make and establish networks, have productive relationships with customers and help their business grow naturally by word of mouth. Most common platforms used by people are Facebook, YouTube,LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace and Digg. There are numerous possible platforms like blogs, social networking sites, forums and web communities that people can join.

Social media marketing uses a unique distribution channel for goods and services- which is online. It is also the same vehicle used for social media marketing and in this case, links and huge traffic means a lot. For newbies, traffic equates to people going to your site or blog. The more natural the traffic, the rankings of your site would increase and have enhanced standing in reputation aggregators like Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves and other browsers. Usually, social media marketing needs some cash spending but it’s worthwhile it as long as you get large traffic to your site. Building links by contributing articles to reputable websites can also do wonders for your website. People who appreciate your content can link back and that increases your ranking. This is the main reason why people who conduct business online should never underestimate the importance of social media marketing.

Ever since social marketing theory was introduced by Kotler and Zaltzmann, several government agencies have created public campaigns using social marketing strategies. Moreover, NGOS and educational institutions have created their social marketing strategies that would primarily influence action to a targeted segment of the population. One of the most prevalent practice by organizations and institutions nowadays is to launch a massive campaign for awareness of a certain health problem such as AIDS or breast cancer which has claimed millions of lives. AVON, the renowned cosmetics retailer, has associated its campaign with breast cancer awareness as an example. In the same manner, there have been numerous marathons launched to benefit patients of cancer or other terminal diseases.

Social marketing strategies are similar to a marketing strategy. Certain concepts are adapted from marketing theories and the four or five elements found in the marketing mix. The marketing mix elements often applied in social marketing strategies are product, price, place and promotion. In one way or another, social marketing strategies puts in additional element that match a given campaign. One of the most important consideration that has to be done in creating social marketing strategies is establishing the objective. There must be a very specific goal that must be communicated to the public. For example, a campaign on breast cancer may utilize all of the marketing mix to produce creative social marketing strategies. The following details illustrate a model of social marketing strategies that are often used for breast cancer campaigns.

Usually, an important goal in formulating social marketing strategies is awareness and then prevention. In the case of breast cancer campaign, a common approach would be convincing women of a certain age to have a mammogram and doing monthly self breast exams. This is the real product behind social marketing strategies. As for the cost, the public is given a warning of how costly breast cancer can be for a person. Promotions are done by launching community campaigns that gives free screening to a target audience so women would actually feel the importance of such. Other factors in social marketing strategies for health campaign are agreements with health institutions like clinics and hospitals. The P for public is the most important element since they are the target. In conclusion, social marketing strategies help agencies to promote wellness at the same time influence behavior.

Ever since the social marketing theory was formally introduced to society by Kotler during the 70s, nations, government agencies, NGOS, private institutions, as well as communities liked the concept and uniquely applied them to create advocacy over an issue.There are many pressing issues that citizens can participate in to seek solutions in their communities. Why communities based? Well for one, they are easier to govern and people know one another so they can easily influence others. Besides, involving people in a community to participate and monitoring activities is more efficient. This is the important role of community based social marketing. There are many issues that a community can engage in such as environmental awareness by reducing carbon footprints they create. Another one would be sustainability so that future generations would still inherit a resource abundant planet. No matter what goal there maybe for community based social marketing, it is always a good cause. Furthermore, citizens are familiar with neighbors and start building a more active community. Isn’t that ideal?

To have a clearer understanding of community based social marketing, it is helpful to understand some tools that are often used in creating campaigns. For example , many programs that tries to promote sustainability have turned to community based social marketing as a vehicle since this very powerful in sending messages to the public. Essentially. this type of promotion is people oriented so questions from the public can be answered thereby producing a higher success rate in changing behavior. The following tools are effective in launching as community based social marketing:

• Prompts – they act as simple reminders in the form of visual images like bumper stickers that rermind people to drive safely or recycle waste

• Commitments – this can be in the form of a pledge that people can sign

• Norms – most of the time, norms can be set by society or community like teaching kids to do recycling

• Compelling communications such as gruesome or striking images that can act as a deterrent to negative behavior like drunk driving
In fact, a lot of valuable strategies can be employed to achieve the desired behavioral change using community based social marketing

These days, the landscape of marketing has dramatically now that web 2.0 technologies are here. In the past few decades, marketing was mainly done in the brick and mortar world where companies heavily paid for public advertisements on movies, radio, television and billboards. Production of such ads requires many preparation as talents, sounds and effects are required Things took a different turn when social web marketing came into the scene. The results were explosive as every possible product or service that man needed and wanted was suddenly on the internet. Purchasing digital goods or services are easy to do since social web marketing equated it to one click of a mouse.

Social web marketing is typically employed by businesses today since they are viral- they rapidly spread to people. Nevertheless, there are some factors that you need to know about social web marketing. First, if in the real world you need an endorser or connection, in social web marketing you need reputation aggregators. These are search engines that efficiently promote you website, blog or link to people all over the world. Popular search engines like Yahoo, Google and Ask Jeeves are very effective in making an impression to browsers about your business. Such search engines use a complicated algorithm to rank you along with other websites. Remember, you are selling to the world so a lot of details have to be considered in social web marketing.

In addition, the right path to great business efficiency in social web marketing is combining any of these three: a website, blog or joining a social network. It would be best if you have all the three elements so you can direct people to all your goods or services. In a way, each of these mix is intended for a certain purpose. The blog is perfect for creating reviews, comments, introduction or any worthwhile stuff for people to read. If they find the content relevant, they would visit the website to see more stuff. In most cases, website with a blog is the perfect combination. Joining social networks can really be of great value in the long run since people or friends can refer your site. In return, you get free viral promotion that spreads your site like a wildfire.

Social web marketing is a necessity in this modern life. Without it your business will lose cutomers and money.

Everyday, millions of people all over the world are exposed to a barrage of media campaigns that promote a specific product or service that promise to make them feel younger, happier, healthier or even sexier than most people. From whitening products to massage services, the media declares the importance of having or owning such products so life would be better. Nonetheless, there are also more pressing issues that must be given solution by NGOS, government sectors and other institutions like millennium goals, global warming, increased prevalence of diseases like AIDS, negative habits like drunk driving and a lot more. Social marketing campaigns are powerful in reaching out to the public particularly when it’s a community based social marketing campaigns.

Social marketing campaigns are applications from the social marketing theory. Social marketing is defined by the National Social Marketing Centre 2006 as “systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good”. So if statistics reveal that smoking cause respiratory diseases that cuts productivity, then health agencies can launch social marketing campaigns that would influence the public to quit smoking. This has been currently practiced in some Asian countries where packs of cigarettes contain vivid images of sick lungs.

Social marketing campaigns can deliver effective messages and promote awareness to the public especially when the medium used is powerful For example, London’s media ad using social marketing campaigns directed towards use of seatbelt is powerful. This was a result of a focused campaign since they depicted gruesome accidents that influence behavioral change among drivers. However implementing social marketing campaigns is not that easy because people do not often change behavior especially when it’s a habitual act like smoking, drinking or reckless driving. This is why it is important for social marketing campaigns to identify barriers to behavior so the public can be influenced effectively. Statistical research for social marketing campaigns are also important for data increase credibility of reports. Also, using community based social marketing campaigns are quite efficient since they reach out to the people on a more personal level. Cost is another thing to consider since people measure the price of giving up or starting a habit. Technology like the Internet has also been popularly used for creating social marketing campaigns. Nonetheless, regardless of strategy adopted, social marketing campaigns are good for the rest of humanity.