City Social Marketing Strategies

City Social Marketing (CSM) has two main elements, the first is City Social Marketing (the field) and the second is City Social Marketing (the site).   CSM (the field) basically uses Social Marketing as it’s basis, but the key aspect lies with “Geographic Locations”.  In City Social Marketing the primary aspect is how things pertain to the local scene, instead of how it relates to the national or international.  Everything is micromanaged with the emphasis on whether something is locally oriented or not.   In this way the site and the businesses and organizations which advertise can concentrate on the local needs of those in a particular community.  Let’s face reality here, the needs of those in Los Angeles are often different than those who live in central Kansas or in Portland, Maine.  City Social Marketing caters to the local scene.

Another baseline strategy is to draw people in by providing them, free of charge or at low cost, with the ability to contact and correspond with others from areas which interest them.  The emphasis for monetary gain lies with such things as advertising, donations, etc.   The idea is that if the people are happy, then they will think more seriously about supporting the site by supporting those who advertise on the site.  Since the advertisements are to be set up in accordance with that particular area of interest, then the people will be supporting their own communities by becoming customers or patrons of places within their own community.

I use people contact as the basis for drawing members because over the years I’ve found that such sites like Classmates and the various forums on the net are things which people enjoy.  According to the Internet World Stats site,  there are 1,319, 872,109+ users on the internet. The US has 215,088,545 users, or about 16.9% of the Users.  The U.S. ranks number 3, right behind India and China. The interesting part of these facts is that the U.S. has an estimated population of 301,139,947 (at this time).  That means that approximately 71% of all Americans are on the Internet.  In addition, Internet World Stats says that North America makes up 18.0% of all internet users worldwide, while 9.6% of the world internet users are from Latin America/Caribbean.  I am not going to analyze why Mexico and Canada make up only 1.1%, and I don’t think it’s really important to do so, what is important is that over 215 million Americans are on the net and that is a big part of the target audience for CSM… for now.

In addition there are message board  and chat systems out there that boast  having 20 Million, to over 40 million people  as members.  What we are talking about is a large portion of users of the net enjoying personal interactions with each other.  CSM uses these facts to bolster it’s whole system.  If people like to chat and contact each other, why not let them do it at CSM?

This is what I call “the heart of City Social Marketing”.