ADVANTAGES 1.

Better Targeting If carried out properly, social marketing can draw a highly targeted segment of Internet users to visit your business or Website. This can be done by using the various parameters elements and tools on social media websites, enabling you to increase visibility of your content on both a local and global level. Many small business can not only benefit from this global audience, but increase their brand by bringing in a more select local audience. 2. High Return on Investment ROI (Return on Investment) is one of the most important criteria of most marketing campaigns. For small businesses with low budgets, the marketing ROI needs to be good for it to work. Social marketing is one of the cheapest ways of marketing currently available. And practically all the social media you can use to market your business either costs nothing or costs a very small amount. This low investment means low risk to even the smallest business. Considering that most businesses gain a big pop in visibility after using social networking tools, the advantage is ultimately getting good publicity for free. 3. Does not require specialization or vast technical skills One of the best advantages of social marketing is that anyone can take advantage of it, even from their own home. Also, it does not require you to learn a coded language or anything of that sort. Most social networking sites are visually oriented and pretty straightforward, which means that practically anyone who understands how to use the Internet can use social networking tools. 4. Works better than online ad campaigns Because most Internet users are bombarded with ads every day, as a whole society has become so used to them people generally do not click on them. Banners and even link ads are losing their charm because many people do not trust an online advertising campaign backed by money. With social marketing, you can provide a more human touch to attract potential customers. 5. Increased visibility Social marketing, like blogging, can help to spread information. This information can then be correlated to your site, increasing your site's popularity. Create new content that people really need and you'll have no problem drawing people to your site. 1. Bad Branding The wrong online brand strategy can doom a company, and put you at a huge viral social disadvantage. Just ask Sony. Sony has a great platform in the PS3 but they chose to neglect the value of effective social media and as a result the sales of the Microsoft Xbox have soared while Sonys always remain number two. 2. Commitment I have mentioned this in past articles, but it really cant be over stated. If your company decided to start a blog, twitter feed, or Facebook page, then designate someone to maintain it. There is nothing worse than going to visit a corporate blog in September and the last post was in June. It tells potential customers that if you are too busy to maintain your blog then you are probably too busy to provide them with customer support. They will shop elsewhere. If as a company you cant commit at least 6-8 hrs a week on Social Media then dont bother with it. Social Media is a living breathing beast. If you feed the beast then the beast works for you, but you need to feed it often.

3. Relevant content! - Lets be honest. Blogs and Twitter feeds tend to take on the persona of their authors and this is a bad, bad thing! It is not an individuals feed or blog, it belongs to the company and they have designated you as the rep to post. Many Social media marketers forget this and think that they are the blog or feed. This will only end in a bad way. Corporate blogs and feeds should be agnostic. They need to be interesting and represent the company, but they should be designed that authors can be swapped out with a limited drop in following. Granted some companies have celebrities that they want to showcase and that is a good thing, but have a plan should they ever leave the company. You do not want all of your social media efforts and ranking to disappear because someone decided to leave the company. Social Media is a marketing tool that needs serious content. No one cares that you are in Switzerland for a conference and seeing the local sites. What readers care about is what technological advances you learned about at the conference that might impact them. 4. Time I mentioned before that getting involved with Social Media is very time consuming. As a company you will need to designate an individual to constantly feed your pages and profile with relevant content (see point three). This individual also has to monitor comments and respond to questions. For small companies this can be a serious problem as they need all hands on deck to keep the company afloat. The commitment of time is why many small companies choose not to engage in social media to boost their marketing efforts. They realize their limitations and simply do without. This is where an outside consultant becomes invaluable. 5. No short term ROI The honest truth is that Social Media Marketing is a long term strategy. Seeing a return could take anywhere from a few months to a year before a company sees the benefits of increased customer loyalty and sales. 6. The risk of negative comments Any time a company opens itself up to open criticism there is the possibility of negative comments about a product or service. I dont see this as a negative. I have always found that the measure of a quality company was how they dealt with problems, and companies that admit their faults, fix them, and carry on, sell more products. Consumers want customer service. They want to know that the company that they bought the product from is fixing any issues quickly and listening to them. Wal-mart used this strategy to help create the employee share program where every employee of a store gets a split of the store they work at profits once per year to reward their employees for their hard work. Walmart used their corporate blog comments to develop this program and increase productivity. History of social marketing Social marketing began as a formal discipline in 1971, with the publication of "Social Marketing: An Approach to Planned Social Change" in the Journal of Marketing by marketing experts Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman. Craig Lefebvre and June Flora introduced social marketing to the public health community in 1988[citation needed] where it has been most widely used and explored. They noted that there was a need for 'large scale, broad-based, behavior change focused programs' to improve public health (the community wide prevention of cardiovascular diseases in their respective projects), and outlined eight essential components of social marketing that still hold today. They are: 1. A consumer orientation to realize organizational (social) goals 2. An emphasis on the voluntary exchanges of goods and services between providers and consumers 3. Research in audience analysis and segmentation strategies 4. The use of formative research in product and message design and the pretesting of these materials 5. An analysis of distribution (or communication) channels

6. Use of the marketing mix - utilizing and blending product, price, place and promotion characteristics in intervention planning and implementation 7. A process tracking system with both integrative and control functions 8. A management process that involves problem analysis, planning, implementation and feedback functions Speaking of what they termed "social change campaigns," Kotler and Roberto introduced the subject by writing, A social change campaign is an organized effort conducted by one group (the change agent) which attempts to persuade others (the target adopters) to accept, modify, or abandon certain ideas, attitudes, practices or behavior." Their 1989 text was updated in 2002 by Philip Kotler, Ned Roberto and Nancy Lee. In recent years there as has been an important development to distinguish between 'strategic social marketing' and 'operational social marketing'. Much of the literature and case examples focus on 'operational social marketing', using it to achieve specific behavioural goals in relation to different audiences and topics. However there has been increasing efforts to ensure social marketing goes 'upstream' and is used much more strategically to inform both 'policy formulation' and 'strategy development'. Here the focus is less on specific audience and topic work but uses strong customer understanding and insight to inform and guide effective policy and strategy development.Types of social marketing Social marketing uses the benefits and of doing social good to secure and maintain customer engagement. In social marketing the distinguishing feature is therefore its "primary focus on social good, and it is not a secondary outcome. Not all public sector and not-for-profit marketing is social marketing. Public sector bodies can use standard marketing approaches to improve the promotion of their relevant services and organizational aims. This can be very important, but should not be confused with social marketing where the focus is on achieving specific behavioral goals with specific audiences in relation to different topics relevant to social good (e.g.: health, sustainability, recycling, etc.). For example, a 3-month marketing campaign to encourage people to get a H1N1 vaccine is more tactical in nature and should not be considered social marketing. Whereas a campaign that promotes and reminds people to get regular check-ups and all of their vaccinations when they're supposed to encourages a long-term behavior change that benefits society. It can therefore be considered social marketing. As the dividing lines are rarely clear it is important not to confuse social marketing with commercial marketing .A commercial marketer selling a product may only seek to influence a buyer to make a product purchase. Social marketers, dealing with goals such as reducing cigarette smoking or encouraging condom use, have more difficult goals: to make potentially difficult and long-term behavioral change in target populations. It is sometimes felt that social marketing is restricted to a particular spectrum of clientthe non-profit organization, the health services group, the government agency. These often are the clients of social marketing agencies, but the goal of inducing social change is not restricted to governmental or non-profit charitable organizations; it may be argued that corporate public relations efforts such as funding for the arts are an example of social marketing.Social marketing should not be confused with the Societal Marketing Concept which was a forerunner of sustainable marketing in integrating issues of social responsibility into commercial marketing strategies. In contrast to that, social marketing uses commercial marketing theories, tools and techniques to social issues. Social marketing applies a "customer oriented" approach and uses the concepts and tools used by commercial marketers in pursuit of social goals like Anti-Smoking-Campaigns or fund raising for NGO