Why would we train our staff in social marketing?
Sure, you can hire a social marketer or agency to do the work for you, but it’s a more complete, cost-efficient, and exciting process to develop your own in-house capacity for tackling problems through the lens of social marketing. (You’re probably already doing social marketing in some form anyway; whether you’re doing it well is the question!). Train your staff, and you truly become a learning organization. And ultimately, it’s cheaper for you. Upstream can provide training with optional follow-up consulting as a cost-effective way of integrating social marketing into your organization.
Social marketing and social media marketing: what’s the difference?
They sound similar, but they are not interchangeable terms. It doesn’t help that occasionally social media professionals define what they do as social marketing.
Social media is a category of sites that is based on user participation, user-generated content, and user interaction, like Facebook and Twitter. Social media marketing is using the Internet to instantly collaborate, share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with others.
Social marketing is the use of modern marketing to influence positive social change. Social marketing deals with the entire marketing mix: a product or service delivered to the right people at the right time for the right price/value. You might choose to use social media marketing as a communications strategy within a larger social marketing initiative.
Upstream Social Marketing provides training on social marketing and social media.
What’s social norms marketing?
The National Social Norms Institute (www.socialnorms.org) describes the social norms approach as correcting negative misperceptions, and identifying, modeling, and promoting the healthy, protective behaviors that are the actual norm in a given population. In other words, people strive to adhere to a social norm, but often they overestimate what the norm is. The social norms approach is often used within a relatively contained population, like a college campus, to reduce excessive alcohol or drug use. Upstream Social Marketing has developed social norms campaigns and used the social norms approach as part of a larger set of social marketing interventions.
