Principles of social marketing

Some simple but clear insights from Alexandra Rampy on social marketing. Read at your leisure. I found the below list of most interest – a set of principles that any socially grounded marketing project should hold close:

1.   What behavior are we wanting to change?
2.   What problem can we help solve?
3.   Where do we want to go?
4.   What’s our long-term plan?
5.   How can we involve the consumer in developing the product, service, message, initiative, movement?
6.   What are the barriers to the behavior we want to influence? the benefits?
7.   What is our consumers’ current environment? Can we change it and how?
8.   How can we add joy into the mix? Will rewarding good behavior provide more results than making consequences for bad behavior?
Before we write a press release to promote something, think first about the other four marketing p’s: price, product and place. Is there a certain product or service we can add into the mix to address behavior change? Is there a certain place in the consumer’s decision-making process where we need to active?
10. What does success look like?
11. Sound off: What other questions should we, with our social marketing hats on, be asking?

This condenses down nicely into (1) listening and understanding, (2) engaging in a way that rewards and (3) measuring behaviour change – which is highly qualitative and cannot be evaluated effectively by clicks and hits. It’s also refreshing to note that Alexandra is *not* talking specifically about social media here. @1000heads think the best results are achieved by thinking outside of the channel and across all social interfaces (advertising, marketing, in-store, billing, care etc) in order to achieve the highest degree of social change. Customers aren’t avatars.

Brought into the world on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 and filed under Uncategorized.