Real Time Collaboration and Web 2.0 tools, tips, and reviews

Thanks for covering this issue! To answer your question, the field of social marketing specifically promotes positive solutions to health and social problems. If a campaign is encouraging non-healthy behaviors, it would not be a social marketing program, but more likely a commercial marketing campaign by a specific company. Hope that clarifies it!

I was trying to come up with a "non-healthy behavior" and smoking was the only one I could think of, but of course you are correct - the main reason an entity would be encouraging non-healthy behavior would be for commercial reasons.

I'm being extremely academic here (too much time to think, I guess), but it seems that Social Marketing would apply to organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas or al Qaeda, where they are encouraging behavior that may be non-healthy, but is viewed as patriotic and religiously correct.

The marketing tools themselves are ethically neutral. How a society judges what behaviors are desirable will vary by culture, so I suppose social marketing is in the eye of the beholder. I think those of us in the Western culture would mostly be able to agree on what is considered a social good. But you are right that the tools used by social marketing can be put to good or evil use. That is why it is so important for marketers to have codes of ethics and accountability.

Thanks for throwing light on social marketing and social media marketing.

The marketing tools themselves are ethically neutral. You are right that the tools used by social marketing can be put to good. You’ve made a good thing to put some light on marketing, I am with you.

I found very useful the highlighted difference between social marketing and social media marketing. Good point!