Top Research Priorities in Interactive Marketing?

I recently became Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Research in Interactive Marketing. Our mission is, according to the web site, " to address substantive issues in interactive, relationship, electronic, direct and multi-channel marketing and marketing management. With its origins in the discipline and practice of direct marketing, the journal aims to publish progressive, innovative and rigorous scholarly research for marketing academics and practitioners."

I recently created a word cloud of the topics covered in the last two years and wonder if we are hitting the mark? I see little research in search optimization, email marketing, multi-channel management, video marketing, b2b lead generation, online branding or other issues relating to that are of relevance to marketers according to my discussion with practitioners and other analyses that I have done of leading issues in Interactive Marketing by analyzing email subject lines. Notably absent are the measurement issues which seem to plague all marketers.

Help me develop the best journal possible by providing insight to the issues in practice that you would like to see researched in a rigorous manner by marketing academics. Provide comments to the blog or email me at zahay@niu.edu. Thanks in advance for your help.

Who is on the net?

We looked at social media sites in our course lab and then this week have been exploring the question of who is on the internet? The internet consumer is in general older, more college-educated and increasingly female. Seventy-five percent of adults now use the internet, with 53 percent using some form of cloud communication. Although mobile applications are increasing in the United States, especially among African-Americans, over half the population, according to the Pew Report, can be classified as more tied to stationary than mobile media. In Europe, mobile applications are more widespread. Some of our class will be attending a presentation on mobile media at a CADM meeting in October so we will learn more about it then. We looked at various models of consumer behavior, such as AIDA, Attention, Interest, Desire and Action to explain how we as marketers want to involve consumers on our web site. Attention, Acquisition, Assessment and Action explains involvement from the marketer's point of view. Once the person is on board as a customer, we want to assess their needs so we can answer them most effectively through interactive communications and offers. We also talked about new ways of finding out what the consumer is thinking, as opposed to traditinal marketing research surveys. Blog posts, customer reviews, etc. all provide insight for the marketer but are harder to control. Anyone can be responding rather than a random sample of a known population. Companies like bizrate.com use panels of consumers to solicit input and control for this problem.