The future of social media in marketing.

Social media allows people to freely interact with others and offers multiple ways for marketers to reach and engage with consumers. Considering the numerous ways social media affects individuals and businesses alike, in this article, the authors focus on where they believe the future of social media lies when considering marketing-related topics and issues. Drawing on academic research, discussions with industry leaders, and popular discourse, the authors identify nine themes, organized by predicted imminence (i.e., the immediate, near, and far futures), that they believe will meaningfully shape the future of social media through three lenses: consumer, industry, and public policy. Within each theme, the authors describe the digital landscape, present and discuss their predictions, and identify relevant future research directions for academics and practitioners.

Age differences in self-referencing: Evidence for common and distinct encoding strategies.

Although engagement of medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) underlies self-referencing of information for younger and older adults, the region has not consistently been implicated across age groups for the encoding of self-referenced information. We sought to determine whether making judgments about others as well as the self influenced findings in the previous study. During an fMRI session, younger and older adults encoded adjectives using only a self-reference task. For items later remembered compared to those later forgotten, both age groups robustly recruited medial prefrontal cortex, indicating common neural regions support encoding across younger and older adults when participants make only self-reference judgments. Focal age differences emerged in regions related to emotional processing and cognitive control, though these differences are more limited than in tasks in which judgments also are made about others. We conclude that making judgments about another person differently affects the ways that younger and older adults make judgments about the self, with results of a follow-up behavioral study supporting this interpretation. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled Memory and Aging.