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Using Social Marketing for Public Health: Global Trends 11

and Twitter) to connect with the target audience, especially the “digital natives,”
who were “born into the digital age (after 1980), with access to networked digital
technologies and strong computer skills and knowledge” (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008,
p. 346).
While “social marketing is one of the fastest-growing areas of marketing and
communications, it is also frequently one of the most misunderstood” (Houghton,
2008, p. 1). The most severe and widely spread misunderstanding about social
marketing is that many people seem to have confused it with social media nowa-
days. In a brief Google search, we found the following misuses of social marketing
as social media or social networking:

Misuse 1: What people are saying about a product in chat rooms, on blogs, on re-
view sites, and in social networks is mistakenly regarded as “social marketing.”

Misuse 2: Web 2.0 technology, “a phase in Web development where users, and not
just professional content creators, write Web-based, Google-searched content,” is
regarded as a practice of “social marketing.”
Misuse 3: Two European countries held the “first international social advertising
and marketing competition . . . to recognize online marketing and advertising
ideas that incorporate the importance of social networks.”
Misuse 4: A Fortune 500 company, which wants to sell more pads and tampons to
young girls, has found “social marketing” more effective than traditional advertis-
ing—not because of its initiative for any social good, but “as a result of the com-
pany’s proven ability to listen to customers and respond effectively” through social
networking.

Misuse 5: A new university course in the United States on “the benefits of social
networking” and the techniques on how to use “online networking sites such as
Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn” to increase “membership or patronage, and po-
tential improvement of revenues” for companies is called “Social Marketing in the
21st Century.”
Although definitions of social media vary in focus and format (Definitions,
2009), social media are not social marketing. Social media can be communication
tools and channels for social marketing, but merely social networking—typical of
social media—is not the social marketing that has been defined and practiced since
this term was born in 1971 (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971). The confusion between social
marketing and social media has given rise to a serious challenge to the identity of
social marketing as a field of practice, research, and education. To clean this
“muddy water” is a battle that all social marketers have to fight right now—and in
the years to come.