Editorial

Citation

Zahay, D. (2012), "Editorial", Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol. 6 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jrim.2012.32506baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Volume 6, Issue 2

As I write I have the first Issue that I edited in front of me, the second out the door and am starting to get a feel of where we want the journal to go. I hope that my first editorial on some future directions for research in interactive marketing has struck a chord and that authors are preparing to answer the call for research in this area that is both academically rigorous and managerially relevant. In this editorial I want to:

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  talk about changes we have made to speed up the review process;

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  make a special call for papers using company data; and

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  review the articles in this issue.

First, many thanks to Jo Alexander, our Development Editor, who has been so helpful in many administrative aspects of the journal, from learning the scholar one system to helping me to understand what it takes to produce an issue. In fact, everyone at Emerald has been very supportive of the suggestions made for improvements. I thank all of you again for your patience during the transition period, especially the reviewers who have provided such quick turnaround and the authors who have too often had to ask where their paper is in the process. Hopefully, we will not have to answer those tough questions too much in the future because we will have streamlined and improved our review processes.

One of the changes that we have made that is really going to help the review process is we have standardized the keywords for both authors and reviewers. I would ask all who are registered as a reviewer on our system to go in and change the keywords indicated your area of expertise. (Do this in Scholar One by clicking “Edit Account” in the upper right hand corner. Correct any of your contact information and then when you get to areas of expertise, clear out the old areas not listed on the left side and substitute the new). Three of us worked on this project but let me know if there are any areas that you think should be added or deleted.

This new keyword system will help us match up manuscripts to reviewers and greatly speed up our processes. We have been playing catch up in terms of production this year and I would like to go back to our standard of thirty days in review. When submitting a paper, use these same keywords as used for author submissions. Categorize your paper in these broad areas we have selected, not your narrow sub-specialty, which will make it easier to match reviewers with manuscripts. We hope to continue implementing the journal’s mission of serving both academics and practitioners by having a lead practitioner article as well as managerial summaries of each article in some future issues.

Second, my suggestion in this editorial is to encourage you all as much as possible to use data provided by companies in your analysis. The internet has resulted in an explosion of data available for analysis from search engine results to clickstreams, and this data should make our lives easier. In addition, practitioners are quite familiar with A/B testing, which should mean that we can compare different conditions, with one as a control, and perform rigorous statistical comparisons.

We can certainly help in the USA a bit abroad if you need introductions to particular companies that may have the data you need. We have also connected with a consulting firm in South America that has a wonderful dataset linking different types of offers based on Cialdini’s influence framework to whether they were successful in web conversion. The company needs to work with an academic to present this data for the journal and particularly needs help with the literature review and discussion. Let me know if you are interested in this project.

If you are not at all familiar with the Wharton’s Customer Analytics Initative (WCAI) www.wharton.upenn.edu/wcai/ they have a lot of data available that companies have produced that can be used in academic research. My goal would be, as in this issue, to have half of the articles in our journal based at least in part on company data.

Last but not of course least, enjoy the articles in this issue. Our first two articles do indeed use company data for their analysis. Keith Coulter and Anne Roggeveen collected data from Groupon offers for their analysis of group purchase decisions and also include an experiment to confirm the results of their online data analysis. Füsun Gönül and Peter Popkowski Leszczyc used data from a live online auction site to extend the research in auction models.

The last two articles in this expand our understanding of consumer marketing in the online context. Hyun-Hwa Lee and Yoon Jin Ma make some helpful suggestions as to how companies can improve their review sites so they are useful to consumers. Yam Limbu, Marco Wolf and Dale Lunsford help us understand the mediating roles of trust and attitude on behavioral intentions. Again, enjoy these articles and I look forward to your comments and suggestions on the journal. As always, I may be reached at: zahay@niu.edu

Debra Zahay