Drexel assistant professor of marketing Dr. Girish Ramani earned 2012 Best Paper Awards for his papers on social media and marketing tactics at an American Marketing Association Conference in February.
Ramani, who has taught marketing at Drexel for six years, presented his two papers in front of top marketing academics from all over the world at the AMA Winter Educators Conference in St. Petersburg, Fla. Feb. 17 and 18.
“The awards are a recognition of the fact that research that innovatively explores and convincingly documents the role of social media in today’s marketing landscape is very timely and relevant to actual marketing practice,” Ramani said in an email.
One of these papers establishes that there are key online metrics that drive music sales and analyzes time series data for a large sample of music artists from across social media websites, such as MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm and Facebook.
Ramani wrote this paper, titled “The Impact of Social Loyalty and Social Word of Mouth on Sales,” with V. Kumar, a professor at Georgia State University.
The second paper for which Ramani was honored at the conference tracks the impact of social media on individual brand sales for a handful of popular music artists, including Lady Gaga and Pearl Jam, through a mathematical modeling approach to be used by brand managers. Titled “The Dynamic Impact of Fan Sign-Ups and Word-of-Mouth on Sales: Evidence from a Social Networking Website,” it was written with the help of Drexel student Hua Chang, a third-year marketing doctoral candidate in the LeBow College of Business.
“I am proud of the fact that Hua Chang … co-authored the second paper with me,” Ramani said.
Ramani currently teaches the marketing elective “New Product Development at Drexel.