This year is a year of extraordinary changes for

This year 2016 is a year of extraordinary changes for this journal. The – (formerly – ) has been repositioned to be a journal with international projection especially interested in addressing current issues in the frontier of knowledge in the marketing field. In this new cycle, the is fully committed and oriented toward an international projection: In this new cycle, the typologies of contributions accepted by the journal have been expanded. welcomes a wide array of original contributions:
Social media remain in continuous growth and by some accounts have become the main channel for costumers to experience and interact with the world. To help attain their goals, people join general or more specialized networks and search, share, participate, consume and play (). The social media phenomenon could be approached from several perspectives. First, from sociology or anthropology, networks favor interaction between people all around the world. Facebook and YouTube reached more than 1000 million users, as presented in . That means that more than one third of all Internet users in the world, and more than one sixth of the global population, are active members of such networks. Second, from an economic approach, social media have an important value for the firms that own them, although often users do not pay for these services. The recent acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft for 26,200 million US$ (more than 102 US$ per user), is an example of the potential value and high rivalry in the social media domain. Corporation\'s strategic mergers and acquisitions to gather clients, such as Facebook purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, reveal how important is for companies to lead this digital evolution. Third, from a marketing approach, social media function as a marketspace in which both buyers and sellers exist (), along with various exchange facilitators (), all interacting with each other in complex ways (). The growth of social media and its information and technology nvp-aew541 are thought to represent a great opportunity – and threat – for companies. Currently, firms have the chance to generate innovative business models and to extend customer relationships through social media. However, the rise of social media has also generated a number of difficult challenges for marketing managers. Previous research has outlined some of these challenges. In an important article, presented a classification of social media based on the level of social media richness (from static blogs to virtual social worlds or games such as Second Life) and self-disclosure (from anonymous content collaborative projects such as Wikipedia to personal presentations in social networking sites such as Facebook). They also suggested that companies choose their social media platforms carefully, develop their own applications when necessary, involve employees, and integrate or align their online activity. They recommended that companies be active, interesting, humble, unprofessional and honest in their social media activity (). From an internal focus, qualitative research has been often employed to describe social media use in organizations as a balance between openness, strategy and management (e.g. ). Focusing on managers’ use of social media, interviewed managers and identified four kinds of mental models (1) business to customers with a transactional focus to promote and sell, (2) business from customers with an informational focus to listen and learn, (3) business with customers with a relational focus to connect and collaborate, and (4) business for customers with a communal focus to empower and engage customers. Focusing on Spanish retailers, found that firms demand greater employee abilities to manage online interactive tools. Social media use highly depends on firms’ size, with large companies using social primarily for branding and small companies using symbiosis for customer service ().
Introduction While social media have become a primary customer information source about products and/or services for many of their users, they are outside the traditional marketing communication domain and, therefore, beyond the full control of marketers. Thus, there is evidence that customer-generated content plays an increasingly important role in the consumer\'s decision-making process (Constantinides, Lorenzo, & Gómez, 2008). Likewise, some recent studies have already investigated the way social-media technology usage is currently contributing to improve customer-relationship management (Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp, & Agnihotri, 2014) and organizational performance (Carmichael, Palacios-Marques, & Gil-Pechuan, 2011). As a result, online marketing management is claiming an increasing portion of marketers’ attention and corporate budgets.