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Introduction 

Social media marketing, once an emergent area of academic inquiry, is ubiquitous. Research over the past two decades has advanced the field of social media marketing beyond the embryotic stage of the research life-cycle, to a well-developed academic discipline (Veloutsou and Liao, 2023). Despite an impressive stream of literature on social media marketing, next generation, cutting-edge research needs to foreshadow the next wave of high priority challenges and opportunities (Wang, 2023). The special issue seeks cutting-edge, next generation, conceptual and empirical research with the potential to offer new insights, theories, methodologies, analyses, and applications. Submissions may be broadly placed into four cutting-edge categories: (1) Users (consumers and/or businesses), (2) Digital technologies and analytics, (3) Theory and scale development, and (4) Revisiting existing topics that need to be updated with new directions. Priority will be given to papers addressing issues relevant to interactive marketing, defined as “the bi-directional value creation and mutual-influence marketing process through active customer connection, engagement, participation and interaction” (Wang, 2021, pp. 1).

The first, and likely largest of the three special issue categories, seeks emergent social media research on consumers and business users. As examples, recent consumer-related research has focused on generational cohorts (Kwon and Ha, 2023), customer experience journey (Ameen et al., 2022), influencers (Sicilia and López, 2023), information sharing (Rodríguez-Torrico et al., 2023), and decision-making (Zadeh et al., 2022). From the perspective of businesses, recent research has focused on a number of areas such as social selling (Barney-McNamara et al., 2021), the personal selling process (Itani et al., 2023), and B2B customer journeys (Lundin and Kindström, 2023). Noting the importance of interactive marketing, in their bibliometric review, Perez-Vega et al. (2023, pp. 2) state that research is needed that “enables marketers to interact with customers going a step ahead, enabling co-creation of products, services, value while providing access to extensive data and deeper customer insights.” 

Second, advancing social media technologies and digital analytics offers unlimited research opportunities in such areas as new social media technologies and platforms (Shen, 2023), artificial intelligence (Peltier et al., 2023), virtual reality and the metaverse (Barrera and Shah, 2023), and livestreaming (Ma et al., 2022). Technological advances will also require the investigation of new social media business models (Brown, 2021), as well as new methods and data analytics (Zachlod et al., 2022). The third research category focuses on theory (Shukla and Dubey, 2022) and scale development (Leite and Baptista, 2022). Lastly, the fourth category seeks submissions that revisit existing topics that need to be updated with new directions.

 

List of topic areas

• Generational cohorts; 
• Customer experience journey; 
• Consumer decision-making; 
• Social media influencers; 
• Consumer welfare issues (i.e., public policy, information privacy/data security issues cybersecurity, social justice and diversity-equity-inclusion-belonging, eco-sustainability, health and wellness, the deep state); 
• Social selling and salesforce management; 
• Emergent social media technologies and platforms; 
• Artificial intelligence (i.e., machine learning, deep learning, AI-enabled technologies, 
• AI interactive marketing applications); 
• Virtual reality and the metaverse; 
• New research methodologies and analytics; 
• Meta-analyses; 
• Blockchain; 
• Social commerce and emerging social media business models; 
• New theoretical perspectives and models; 
• Scale development

 

Guest Editors

James W. Peltier, 
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA, 
[email protected] 

Andrew J. Dahl, 
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA, 
[email protected]

 

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available by clicking the button below.

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Author guidelines must be strictly followed.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. 
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

 

Key deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 08 June 2023
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 01 February 2024