Social Marketing

Social marketing is a mystery.

While the western markets have embraced this medium wholeheartedly, devised strategies to further its effectiveness and counter negative publicity, the market in this region is still trying to understand the medium and never venture more than the basic banner advertisements.

For this part of the world social media has its own charm. In societies where free media has its restriction, people turn to the online media for expression and information. In a region like Bahrain the online community is a vast, untapped resource - whatever efforts to capture them so far have been pale imitations of international campaigns or unplanned campaigns done without adequate research.

And ofcourse, the inevitable and age-old argument that "our target audience are not the internet audience", does not carry water any more.

Given below is a very good review by one of the worlds best interactive agencies, Razorfish. This review gives a series of trends in social marketing over the year 2008.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/9586348/The-Marketing-Funnel-Ain-t-Dead