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.

I'm not referring to plumbing or digestion although that might make a more interesting post.

I'm talking about good old practical, common sense, you know you should do it, but may not know how, backing up your blog posts, members, comments and trackbacks. It's all the stuff that actually makes a blog a blog.

I am out at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas and I had an interesting conversation with Carsten Cumbrowski about advertising on social networks, specifically Facebook Carsten made argument that Facebook can be a very good site to advertise on from a branding perspective.

The king of branding is traditional media. When you advertise on traditional media like TV, radio or print, it is always difficult to tell how well the campaign performed from a conversion perspective. You can estimate that X number of people heard, watched or read your ad, but that is about all. Your advertising campaign builds brand awareness and share of mind, which ultimately leads to more sales, but it is very difficult to translate one specific ad to that sale.

When times are good, buying things is a sport. It's a reward. The story we tell ourselves is that we deserve it, that we want it and why not?



When the mass psychology changes and times are seen as not so good, the story we tell ourselves changes as well. Now, we buy out of defense, to avoid trouble. Or we buy because something will never be as cheap again. Or we buy smaller items for the same sense of reward.

Aaron likes to give his spiel about passion and that you need to be gunuinely interested in the topics you are promoting. I took that advice for granted and its importance finally hit me. One of the sites I'm promoting is very clean and I have very high respect for its merit. However, I was given the challenge to promote a seasonal yet very important topic for a specific audience. In addition, I was the one to write the content. That was a bit unfair due to my lack of experience in that field. It's convenient to dodge work so I outsourced the content. Besides, promotion is the real challenge. Ok, I was wrong. The final version of the outsourced material needed heavy changes and it didn't satisfy the person who originated the idea.

Here is a wonderful post submitted in by a guy named Owen who runs a blog titled, The Linux Blog. Some pretty good strategy about assessing and dealing with your competition. I am sure you'll enjoy it. My family and I are going to Disney World in five days and will be gone for five days. If you'd like to see your posts go live on GCDC you can register for an account and write your post. Simply save your post and "Submit For Review". I'll then review it and schedule it for inclusion.

Everyone loves free stuff, right? Here are three quality things that will make your weekend better, and you won't even have to open your wallet.

The Medici Effect

Remember when I mentioned the book The Medici Effect in my content crossroads post? Well, author Frans Johansson has released the entire book online in PDF format on The Medici Effect site. I'd still spring for it in paperback, but at least now you can read as much as you want before you part with any bucks.

Have you taken the time to sit down and put your blog's goals on

paper?  Do you know why you are blogging and what you want to

accomplish from your efforts?  Excellent.  But don't fool yourself into

thinking that all you need is a plan, that's just your starting point.

Let's look at some of the reasons why a business might want to consider blogging:

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.

This is a guest post from Pierre Far, who recently launched a very cool program called Social Alerter which notifies you as soon as your website has a solid chance of hitting the Digg or del.icio.us frontpage.

We have all engaged in debates over the past few years about social media. Is it new? If so, how? Even a recent thread on Cre8asite Forums discussed this, kicking off by someone stating they find social media very intimidating.