Nedra Weinrich, from the Social Marketing blog and the movement that is all about changing the world to be aware of unhealthy lifestyle choices including: smoking, over-tanning, etc. pinged me today to tell me how frustrated she is that for-profit companies keep co-opting 'Social Marketing' to mean 'Social Media Marketing'.

Nedra, herself, has nothing personally against social media marketing (like word-of-mouth campaigns, crowdsourcing, evangelizing, etc.), but it tends to make her life as a social marketer a little more difficult (a movement she has been involved in for many years). She also doesn't personally profit off of the practice and would like to keep social marketing about marketing healthy social choices rather than being another tool for enterprise to profit.

I agree with her fully.

On first glance, you may say, what's the big deal? Well...

It's almost an issue of trademarking (which she may consider doing...maybe a community mark?). If someone came along tomorrow and said that Pinko Marketing was the practice of painting everything pink or creating viral campaigns, I would take issue, too. Especially if it was someone with a far reach like Jupiter Research.

So, Jupiter works on creating a brand in the wider community and all of a sudden people don't understand what Nedra is actually working on...which is important stuff. She is raising issues of public health awareness...not merely raising profits for clients.

If you still need to know the difference and why the distinction is important, check out Nedra's post, where she shows a great chart to illustrate this.