Social networking is nothing new. Neighbors used to sit out on the porch at night and talk with each other. On the weekends thery would gather at the local bingo hall or friday night dance. 

Social networking websites help people connect with others who share their interests, build online

profiles and share media such as photos, music and videos. The idea of social networks has been

studied by sociologists for decades as they analyze the ties between people in families, organizations

and even in towns or countries.

Early Internet applications such as Usenet and bulletin board systems allowed people to communicate

and network, often in closed systems. But with the advent of the web in the mid-'90s, people could

connect in more visually appealing and public ways. Classmates.com let people connect with old

classmates online, and SixDegrees.com offered a way to meet "friends of friends" -- with its name

referring to the six degrees of separation between everyone in the world.

After the dot-com bust in 2000, SixDegrees was shut down and eventually Friendster became the

leader in social networking sites. A common feature of these services was the list of "friends" or

contacts that each user maintained, driving usage of the site by people inviting more friends, who invited

more friends, and so on and so on... Even though Friendster eventually collected millions of users, the

service was plagued by technical issues and was strict about fake profiles known as "Fakesters," which

it deleted en masse.

Social marketing's keyfactor is interaction with your clients you can do research by visiting forums and finding out your customer needs and wants then provide the product or service they want.

Marketing talks to the consumer, not about the product. The planning process takes this consumer focus into account by addressing the elements of the "marketing mix."

This refers to decisions about

1) the conception of a Product,

2) Price,

3) distribution (Place),

4) Promotion.

These are often called the "Four Ps" of marketing. Social marketing

also adds a few more "P's." At the end is an example of the

marketing mix.

 Let's look at some points and mindsets  you need to adopt in order to make your marketing pay big.

1. Focus on selling benefits, not features

2. Know your prospect and how to reach them 

3.Know who your competition is.

4Understand the problems your prospects face and how you can solve them. 

(AP) Saying it went too far in its pursuit of profit, the popular Internet hangout Facebook Inc. is allowing its 55 million users to permanently turn off a new marketing tool that tracks their activities at other Web sites.

The privacy control, announced in a Wednesday apology by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, will likely limit the reach of an application called "Beacon." The tool is part of a month-old program that the Palo Alto-based startup had hailed as an advertising breakthrough.

Facebook users attacked Beacon as a flagrant violation of privacy. The tool enables Facebook to track its users' purchases and actions at dozens of Web sites and then broadcast the data on the pages of their listed friends within its social network.

"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them," Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook's blog. "We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it."

Empowering users to block Beacon entirely "is big step in the right direction, and we hope it begins an industrywide trend that puts the basic rights of Internet users ahead of the wish lists of corporate advertisers," said Adam Green, a spokesman for the advocacy group MoveOn.org.

More than 65,000 Facebook users signed a petition that MoveOn organized against Beacon.

Critics remain worried that Facebook and other popular Web sites will deploy increasingly sophisticated technology to shadow Web surfers' activities in an attempt to tailor advertising more and more specifically.

"The move to allow users to turn Beacon off entirely may restore a small measure of control to Facebook's members, but it is by no means an adequate safeguard for ensuring privacy protection on this and other social networking platforms," said Kathryn Montgomery, a professor at American University.