Blogging for over a year has been a great learning experience for me.  What I have learned has prompted me to think more about what I can write that will provide the best value to my readers.  After devoting much thought to the question, I decided that filling the gap between the academia and marketing practice will be the best area to focus on, and hence the new subtitle “Bridging the Gap Between Academia and Marketing Practice”.  This subtitle reflects the new direction that Ping! will take in the future.  What I intend to do is to discuss cutting-edge marketing and psychology research and its implications for marketing practice, and at the same time bring new trends, questions, and thinking from the practical world back into the academia. Being a marketing academic who also frequently interacts with the industry, I feel particularly compelled and passionate to fulfill this role.

You might be wondering why I am passionate about this.  To list just a few of my reasons:

• Few academic marketing journals are read by anyone other than academics themselves, so much so that some academic researchers joke that we write for ourselves.  Why is this the case? It has a lot to do with the way we write in the academia and our insufficient discussion of how our research can be applied to business practice.
• Another contributing factor is the poor publicity that academic marketing journals receive. This is somewhat ironic, and has a lot to do with the lack of funding by many journals to publicize their research.
• In today’s quickly changing business environment, the academia has sometimes trailed behind in terms of what we are studying and practicing. A case in point: the only academic marketing journal that uses Twitter is the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (@JAMS_updates), and even that is to broadcast to the world rather than building a dialogue (it is not following anyone).

The end result of all this is that we academics limit the impact of our hard work and at the same time may spend time on things that are not the most important/relevant to practice.  My intention therefore is to discuss some excellent research that is especially relevant for business, and how a company can apply the findings to improve their marketing practice.  From time to time, I will also talk about business issues that need more academic research on.

With this shift in focus, Ping! will post a new entry every one to two weeks, and each entry will appear on Monday or Tuesday of the week.  Here’s a preview of what is coming up in Ping!:

• Why companies experiment with Second Life and what they have learned
• Research on automaticity and what it means to marketers
• Consumption and sharing of user-generated content

What do you think?  Please feel free to share your thoughts.  If you are a marketing practitioner and would like to see an issue discussed or researched, please feel free to share them here or drop me a note.

I am currently working with Michelle Rogerson on a research project studying the rise of popular user-generated content online.  In particular, we are interested in identifying the reasons why some content (such as some YouTube videos; see Top 10 YouTube videos) gain star status, whereas others are barely paid any attention to.  We surmise that network properties as well as author characteristics both contribute to such contrast in circulation and popularity.  I will talk more about the research project in future blogs.  But right now, as part of the project, we are conducting an exploratory survey of people’s usage and sharing of user-generated content.  We would appreciate it if you could please spare 10 minutes of your time to fill out this short survey.  I will post the findings on my blog once the survey concludes.

I have been using Twitter for a while now under a personal account.  As of yesterday, I have finally decided to separate the more business and technology-oriented tweets into a different public Twitter account (@PingTweets).  It will allow me to provide more frequent updates on business and technology ideas in between my blog updates.  I will be updating my blog soon to show PingTweets on the sideline.  In the meantime, you can follow PingTweets at http://twitter.com/PingTweets.