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The rise of a generation of new technologies and services, known as “social media”, provides considerable challenges and opportunities for practitioners and analysts of social marketing. In parallel with this rise, the theory and practice has tended to concentrate on the “marketing” side of “social marketing”, leaving the “social” relatively untouched. Some point to an existential threat from new technologies, which appear to overwhelm traditional communications. This paper seeks to re-examine and reclaim the “social” side of social marketing, offering the prospect of improved effectiveness for our work.

Frustration with traditional approaches to behaviour change and community development, including poor targeting and limited success has driven social change leaders – governments, academics, practitioners and opinion leaders – to turn to new approaches (Duhaime, McTavish et al., 1985). In this context, social marketing has enjoyed a significant expansion in its application in rich countries, including Australia and North America on issues such as alcohol use, smoking, littering, heart disease, recycling and elections. Marketing is a “social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others” (Kotler, Roberto et al. 2002). Since 1952, when G. D. Wiebe asked the question, “Why can’t you sell brotherhood…like you sell soap?”, social marketers have attempted to answer it by developing and testing marketing models and applying them to social issues.

Success with social marketing in rich countries gave rise to questions about its applicability in other countries in the hope that it could hold the key to major advances on complex issues relating to poverty, injustice and disadvantage. Since 1965, when a report to India’s Central Family Planning Board recommended how existing marketing resources of the private sector could be marshalled behind family planning drives, poor and emerging countries have applied social marketing to micro-credit, infectious disease, climate change, human rights, education and access to technology (Chandy, Balakrishman et al., 1965).

While much of the debate centered on the applicability of marketing models to social and behavior change, the concept of “social” was left largely untouched. Social has meant two things – a population and its problem. Many qualitative and quantitative methods and models see “target populations” and their behaviours largely as a homogeneous object of research and intervention. This one dimensional approach means that public interventions do not engage with dynamics that the target populations themselves experience, including the social dynamics that influence behaviours (Measham and Brain, 2006). Some analysis suggests that social and behaviour change policies and interventions have been significantly limited by the ways in which “the problem”, eg. alcohol misuse or HIV/AIDS, has been conceptualised and addressed (Moore and Rhodes, 2004).

The rapid emergence and dominance of technologies and services that are referred to collectively as social media has captured the public attention. The numbers are staggering, with Facebook amassing over 845 million active users since its inception in 2004 (Protalinski, 2012). Twitter has over 300 million users, generating over 300 million short messages (tweets) and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day (Taylor, 2011). In the twenty years from 1990 to 2011, global mobile phone subscriptions grew from 12.4 million to over 5.6 billion (Market Watch, 2011). However, there is much that is not new in the behaviours that these technologies enable. In many respects, they enable people to do what they have always wanted to do, but not had the opportunity to do so (Shirky, 2010).

Capturing the impact of these developments, the following are four elements grouped together to redefine the “social” side of social marketing:

Connectivity: the ease of access to people all over the world at any time of the day means breaking down barriers and many more opportunities to connect. New tools and new ways of sharing are making progress toward shared solutions easier and more frequent. Technology enables collaboration but human need drives it.

Collaboration: people are demonstrating that they want to be partners not just consumers in the social and behaviour change. Whether it is controversies over vaccines or same sex marriage, people are not content with a one way feed of information. They want to participate in the process of communicating and shaping change that affects them.

Community: how people feel about the groups of which they are a part is a an unexplored area of social marketing. However, there is evidence from the field and other disciplines, such as community psychology, that how a person feels about their community has an impact on the propensity toward behavior change. Social network analysis explores how the structure of linkages (or ties or relationships) between individuals in groups influences diffusion processes (Axsen, 2010).

Concern: previously known as the “problem”, this has been renamed the “concern” to reflect the empirical and social nature of its qualities. The empirical impact of a behaviour, eg. alcohol misuse and violence, can be measured and tracked. The social nature, eg. how popular a cause is, helps to predict the public and political appetites for an intervention to address it.

The four elements defined above combine to encompass an enlarged and improved concept of “social”. These recognize formally the impact of new technologies, including the profound change in the ways information is produced and shared. These elements also recognize the foundations of social in human behaviours, especially those informed by psychology and sociology. By harnessing the promise of new technologies, whilst understanding the human drivers of their use, practitioners and analysts of social marketing will have more opportunities to improve their work.

*This is a draft of an abstract submitted to the International Social Marketing Conference to take place in Brisbane in June 2012.