I suppose I have felt the need to contrast them so as to illustrate, from a larger firm’s organisational point of view, what it takes to conceive, set up and manage a structure capable of undertaking SMM with a single ‘voice’. For a smaller company, they do merge into one activity, just as sales and marketing are grouped as ‘business development’..

They are sides of the same coin but, at the same time, you need to be aware that the coin is there!

I have clients who have been successfully using email and SEO for many years, and they are generally interested in exploring social media within the marketing mix. But they won’t be throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Not sure about the rigid distinction between ’social media marketing’ and ’social media networking’. For me they are sides of the same coin. Surely it’s a feature of social media that the old definitions of marketing are being redefined - the audience is no longer passively taking in ‘marketing messages’, it is creating its own content, publishing its own ideas & sharing it in ways it controls.

Anyone treating social media purely as a tool for content distribution and syndication is missing the whole point of it, which is engagement, placing it very much within CRM. I’m puzzled as to how social media marketing can ‘have no role in CRM’, if it can, as you say, generate extraordinary loyalty. In my mind, that kind of loyalty has nothing to do with PR spin, promotional tactics or customised messages. It comes about as companies open up, listen in and collaborate with customers, person-to-person. Which sound a bit like social networking to me.

Logically depending on our background we will be more adept at one of them. However, we can only ignore the others at our peril…. which is why I am in the middle of a SEO course!