How to make Coventry university website better?

CU Home and CU Online

Taking a cursory look through the Coventry University website, one sees a good brand well put together. But that is not enough in marketing the school because quality demands the website to be detailed, relevant, personalized, easy to find, timely, clear, accurate and up to date.

Search Engine Optimisation

Gone are the days when the world will find its way to your doorstep if you had a better mousetrap. These are the days of information proliferation in which the customers are continuously bombarded with loads of options on the internet and every brand, including Coventry University (CU), has to devise bett

er marketing mechanics to make it easier for customers to find their way to the virtual doorstep of the brand, that is, the website. In the process of preparing this piece, an experiment was carried out to check how CU has utilised the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to market its website. The result was a negative surprise. On Google,

arguably the world’s most popular search engine, the CU website did not appear until the tenth page when the key phrase ‘UK university’ was typed in the search bar. This shows many potential customers reluctant to click until the tenth page might not find out the CU website using this important key phrase. However there are ways to improve the university’s visibility on web and making it rank among the first page competitors. One of such ways is to increase its use of branded community-based websites (social networks, e-communities and blogs) which will drive more traffic to the CU website thereby p

ushing it up the SEO ladder. Another approach is to devote more budget to search engine marketing. In this case, SEO firms will be paid for both advice and optimization work to make the website rank higher.

Apart from SEO technique, there are other aspects of CU online we need to put into consideration. All the useful contents (texts) such as ‘Modules Information,’ ‘IT Help’ are put in the middle. Firstly, it appears that 24 hours online representative for student request. 24/7 online help desk failed to meet. For example, when technical problem occurs, it is not likely to connect the chat line to find the solution. It just appeared that the line is busy. It means the university has not met their promise. Furthermore, the university has tried to display as much as useful information in the front page. However, those features have not been well deployed. Too much texts make the website become unprofessional. It looks funny, clunky and the word” CU Portal” in the banner seem to be out of the box. As a result, it might fail to convey that the website is trustworthy. Again, putting more useful texts and individual tag in the front page are good for students to access to information, however, it would better if there is Search Engine Customization bots to every step of the way to help students to navigate the page.

The home page of the Coventry University website shows the courses offered by the university, for example postgraduate courses, after selecting advertising, detailed information is not given, what is shown is the course name and code plus duration of study. Then one has to take more time searching for the details, so information is not easy to find.

When a course is selected, there should be detailed information, for example cost of studying.

CU online help page, where one has to write a question or comment is not clearly shown. The aspect of finding information easily is not there. One has to scroll through many questions and comments to get where to write his/her question at the bottom of the page, this is time consuming. A page can be created just for asking questions and a different page with the questions and comments or it can be at the beginning of the help page then the comments follow.

Coventry University Online Store

Coventry University online store offers a range of products and services which are interesting and useful for undergraduate, postgraduate and alumni. The payment procedure is fast and doesn’t require too many details to complete the purchase. The receipt is sent after the purchase is completed to the customer’s e-mail address. However, there are no details about the service besides the price on the receipt.

For example, if it is a trip to another city it would be better to include the date and time of departure of the trip on the e-ticket because most of the trips are bought online several weeks before the trip and the customer might forget the time or date of the trip.

The range of products and services can be diversified with online store of used books for students where they can exchange books, buy or sell them for better prices and spend much less time for delivering.

The database of events can be improved to have more professional conferences and seminars for students in different faculties with more affordable prices.

Technology Park link doesn’t work. When the click is done on the link the error is being indicated and the page requested does not exist on the server. It is advisable easer to fix it or to remove in order to maintain professional image of the online store.

Does your website generate Trust?

( Source: Amazon.co.uk web page)

Trust and trustworthiness

Tullberg (2008) reviewed that two components of trust are trustfulness and trustworthiness; trustworthiness determines the increase or decrease of trust. Other researcher argued that trust is focused on an individual’s enthusiasm to entrust, to do something where the support of other people is important for results; trustworthiness is more likely related to the individual’s capability to interact with others and create the reliable information for the group as a whole ( Bolton, et 2008).

Most scholars in marketing research draw upon a belief-based conceptualization of trust that it is perceived from trustworthiness (Gefen 2003 cited in Buttner and Goritz 2008: 39). Researches prove the higher the perceived trustworthiness; the more likely visitors are to buy from the web-site. In addition an increase in perceived risk lowers the intention to buy, which is partially influenced by reducing the perceived trustworthiness of the web-site.

According to Wood (2006), an interesting viewpoint about trustworthiness is that the proponents of the neuro-linguitic programming (NLP), which is a human communication theory, suggests that building rapport is solely dependent on the communication process and not the content. In reality, this means that buyers (the receiver) from a football club’s website, for instance, will develop confidence and trust in the virtual store because of their perception of the owners of the website (the sender) and not necessarily due to what is said on the website (the content).

How to be trustworthy

According to Mayer (cited in Buttner and Goritz 2008:36) trust is a perceived trustworthiness. In order to gain trustworthiness three main functions have to be performed by a web-site:

- Ability to fulfil given promises
- To be interested in consumers well-being
- To follow a set of desirable principles.

To put differently other scholars were of the opinion that there are four determinants of a trustworthiness of a web-site: viz-a-vis usefulness, competence, integrity, reputation (Miller 2008). Our analysis of these determinants will be based on the use of Manchester United web-site layout:

· Usefulness
The website has a variety of high quality products to offer, however, it would be much better to have forums or product's comments for new visitors to know more about the information of the products.

· Competence
Since Miller (2008) admitted in his research that most users are likely to look for positive cues that signal a professionally designed website which tends to improve the sites trustworthiness. Thus, in case of this football club website, let’s look at the typography; there are some positive and negative cues. For example, the red colour is likely to appeal and arouse visitors’ positive emotions which influence his / her decision to spend more time on the site. However, the amount of words and texts seem to confuse the viewers.
· Integrity
In order to test the integrity for the trustworthiness, Beatty (2008) raised a question for the site: 'Does the website exhibit honesty, ethical behaviour?'. That means whether the site addresses information about security, privacy concerns and identity disclosure or not. In case of the Manchester website, the layout showed the VeriSign services and the security confirmation. It raises the level of customers’ trustworthiness. Another good aspect of Manchester United online store is that its merchandise is licensed and provides high level of customer care.

· Reputation
Manchester United is a well-known football club, the reputation is already established and the image of this club speaks for itself. That is why the website has strong credibility which is enhanced with the front page layout. To buttress the point, the image of the world best footballer of the year 2008, Cristiano Ronaldo, is displayed and this therefore increases the chances that visitors of the website will turn into potential buyers.



The level of Trustworthiness

According to the research of Charkrboty and Charkrboty (2007), the level of worthiness will be not at all, below moderate, moderate, somewhat and fully trustworthy.

In the research, they found that:

· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical know-how are average then the website could be said not to be trustworthy.

· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical knowhow are good, then the website could be counted trustworthy.


· If the advertising rate, customers’ satisfaction, after-sales services, price and quality and technical knowhow are fair, then the trustworthiness level could be said to be fair as well.

References

Tullberg, J (2008) ‘Trust- the importance of trustfullness versus trustworthiness’, the journal of Socio-Economics ,37 (5), 2059-2071

Bolton, Gary; Loebecke, Claudia; Ockenfels, Axel ( 2008) ‘Does Competition Promote Trust and Trustworthiness in Online Trading? An Experimental Study.’ Journal of Management Information Systems, 25 (2), 145-169

Chakraborty, C and Chakraborty, D (2007), Fuzzy rule base for consumer trustworthiness in Internet Marketing: An interactive fuzzy rule classification approach, Intelligent Data Analysis, 11(4), 339-353

Wood and Andy, J (2006), NLP revisited: nonverbal communications and signals of trustworthiness.Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 26 (2),197-204

Ofuonye,E, Beatty,P, Reay,I, Dick,S, Miller J (2008), How do we build trust into E-commerce websites?Journal of E-commerce, 25(5), 7-9

Buttner, Oliver, B; Goritz and Anja, S (2008), Perceived trustworthiness of online shops... Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 7(1), 35-50

Importance of online communities

With the advent of the internet came a lot of new developments in the way people connect with one another. One of such ways is through the online communities. These communities are commonly referred to in different terms such as virtual communities, e-communities and, of course, online communities because the basic criteria for these groups' interactions is the use of the internet as a connection/communication platform as against meeting face-to-face for their purposes. Weber (2007:88) defined these virtual groups as ‘online sites where people aggregate around a common interest area’ and his examples include WebMD, ivillage and DailyCandy. Whatever the area of interest is to the aggregators, they always patronise these sites for information, networking, news or entertainment. Chaffey & Smith (2008: 163-4) argued for the importance of online communities saying the paradigm shift in communication means that marketers have to focus their attention on these offshoots of the new media. In this write-up, two types of online communities will be examined and they include browser-based and video game based communities.

Man is a sociable animal (Chavey and Smith 2008). People are not interested in living in isolation, they like interaction and communication.That is why people embraced virtual communities upon introduction. John Hagel (Hagel and Armstrong 1997) identifies the importance of virtual communities by saying ‘The rise of online communities in virtual networks has set in motion an unprecedented shift from vendors of goods and services to the customers who buy them. Vendors who understand this transfer of power and choose to capitalise on it by organising virtual communities will be richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns. There some disadvantages of virtual communities that has been noted by scholars. Some pointed out its lack of editorial control (Keen 2007).Others say it affects our culture and values (Chaffey and Smith 2008). However, the advantages are stronger when compared with its demerit. For example, people use it for opinions and views expression on topic, keep in touch with family and friends, dating avenues, have fun playing virtual games and above all expose you to the world of internet where you can access any specific thing you want to do with just a click.

Advantages and disadvantages of online communities

Speaking about online communities it is important to analyze each of their strengths and weaknesses in order to use them in achieving successful business purposes.
For example, video games is a popular subject of discussion at educational organizations, because one of the advantages of video games is the ability to develop children’s motor skills and social behaviour. Video games help to develop better level of concentration and affect kids remembering, memorizing, and linear thinking (PC Magazine 2006).
At the same time there is a problem with playing video games. According to Jane Simms video games develop addiction and promote sitting style of life, which leads to obesity (Director 2006).
Another representative of online community is browser based community, which allows people to interact without any specific equipment installation or software. It makes communication easier and allows many organizations to facilitate online conferences. Such things as frequent download of HTML in order to see new message, difficulty ‘to build the room for every member of conversation’, spam, not available archiving leave the opportunity for improvement of browser based communities (Journal of Website Promotion 2006).

How company can target the online community ?

Nowadays more and more people have spend their time on Face book, My Space, dating sites or online Game like War Craft and Lord of the rings. They have become a large online community. This group could be a huge potential for businesses to advertise events and products as most of people in this group have disposal income and time.

In order to make advantage of this group, businesses need to have clear marketing tactics. According to Miller, et (2009), companies can interact with online communities by many ways:
· Observing and collecting information
· Hosting or sponsoring communities
· Provide content to communities (such as music , information or entertainment)
· Participating as members of online communities
It is quite interesting that if companies do not have experiences of e-marketing, they can ask a web hosting company to do all jobs for them such as web man

aging and viral marketing to online communities. An example of web hosting in the UK is simplewebhosting.co.uk. All requirements of clients can be meet.

It is also quite effective when companies participate as members of online communities. They can either observe their customers’ behaviour or collect useful information for product consolidation. For example, with Second Life, companies can create their own entities for the purpose of brand advertisement. Also, You Tube is a place for cosmetic companies to post their beauty tutorials. Via clips, they can also receive comments and feedbacks from viewers and of course, if the clips are nice, they might go out and buy the similar products.

(Second Life )References:

Chaffey,D., Smith, P.R. (2008). e Marketing, e excellence: Planning and optimizing your digital marketing. London: Elsevier

Hagel, J. And Armstrong, A. (1997). Net Gain: Expanding market through virtual communities. Harvard Business Press

Keen, A. (2007). The Cult of Amateur: How the Democratisation of the Digital World is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Cultures and Our Values. Double day currency

Weber, L. (2007) Marketing to the Social WebNew Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Miller, K.D, Fabian, Fand Lin, S. J, (2009) ‘ Strategies for online communities’, Strategic Management Journal, 30, 305-322

http://jmo.e-contentmanagement.com/archives/vol/13/issue/4/review/124/journal-of-website-promotion-vol-1(1)

http://www.pcmag.co.uk/search/?subsection=&currentZone=articles&start=1&page=&articlesSort=date&downloadsSort=relevance&forumsSort=relevance&reviewsSort=relevance&staticSort=relevance&jobsSort=relevance&maxresults=20&articlesMax=20&downloadsMax=20&forumsMax=3&reviewsMax=20&staticMax=3&subsectionMax=20&jobsMax=3&articlesMinscore=65&reference=&sourceDisplay=&age=36500&source=+AND+%28information-technology%3ASOURCE%29&zone=downloads&q=online+communities

Interactive TV- the domination of cyber world

More and more new hi-tech products are entering the market and approach consumers every day. Among them it is important to mention interactive digital TV, which was created with a purpose to benefit consumers providing them more variety of services and more control. It allows consumers to interact with TV. For example, consumers can choose the content of TV programs, buy products, and pause the advertisement in order to know more about the product they are interested in.

As every product, interactive digital TV has its strengths and weaknesses.
As for instant access using phone lines for return path, it is logical to agree to the fact this method is slower than others and could also be a serious challenge to this technology. Compared to other methods like SMS, cable, radio and digital subscriber lines, telephone can be said to be the least attractive in terms of speed. This is why the broadband connection is fast becoming familiar with more and more subscribers today. In fact it is estimated that in the near future a large majority of subscribers in the UK will be on one broadband connection or the other as far as iDTV is concerned.

Personalization is another aspect to consider when it comes to iDTV. PC and mobiles don't have several viewers. It is an item of personal usage. That is why it is easy to reach and control individual viewer's particular interests, to track what programs he/she watches, what information he/she looks for using the mobile.
Interactive television will be used to invade viewers' privacy (www.bbc.co.uk).
PC is not less practical for personalisation but on the contrary works as a 'stimulator and motivator' for iDTV. It is one of the means to watch it. Even though there might be several viewers there will be only one user at a particular time on a particular PC, whose personal details will be tracked and it will be possible to identify the person who will view iDTV through the particular PC.

Security of personal details is the major concern when it comes to e-commerce (Johnston 2003: 109). Using any media to buy service or product online causes always a risk of fraud. In this case iDTV has the advantages to offer. Once a customer registered and created an account there is no need to put personal details every time as they are saved by the service provider. Potentially iDTV is more secure than the Internet since personal and credit card details can be held centrally by the service provider, avoiding the need for the customer to enter their details each time (Marketinginsights).

List of References

Johnston, K (2003) Internet Marketing. Essex: Pearson Education Limited

http://www.marketinginsights.co.uk/wnim0302.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/digital/tv/index.shtml

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PC haunted by Mobile phones

We cannot agree any less that PCs are on the verge of losing their dominance taking into consideration the recent innovations in mobile phone. Mobile phone is considered to be a remote control in our life because it performs multiple functions such as communication, organisation and storage of data,entertainment, fashion accessory and so on. As a result of these, there has been tremendous increase in the number of people using mobile phones. Research has shown that the figure has risen from 215 million in 1997 to 961 million in 2001 and as at 2003 we had 1.16billion (Bauer et al, 2005). This increment came about as a result of the technology development. Before now mobile phones were for calls and text messages alone but have now gone beyond all that into a new era in which our daily life revolves around it.

Furthermore, mobile phone internet access is quite convenient because of its portability and mobility features. The key word here is convenience. We can do numerous activities on the go without having any need to get home or office where our computers are thereby making business and life easier. The BBC website is the most mobile accessible online news with an average number of visitors of 1.7million per month (The Mobile news, 2008) in so doing keeping people informed on happenings.
To drive the point home, it is important to highlight some wonderful functions mobile phone will perform in the year 2025. These include:

• Knowing your traveling plans and alerting the user before the scheduled trip to be embarked upon by train, bus or plane

• providing monitored report of the owner's blood pressure and pulse.

• providing direction through inbuilt navigation; thereby giving the user the best route to work.
• controling activities at home from a remote destination, tracking car movement etc.
• providing payment system like the Oyster card readers presently used on London buses and a lot more.(www.independent.co.uk)

However, the only challenge we might have is the network coverage which might be a thing of the past by then. Thus, we should get ready to embrace mobile intelligence technology with higher resolution touch-screens, real speech recognitions, and greater memory and storage capabilities.(www.independent.co.uk)

References:

Bauer. H, Barnes. S, Reichardt. T, Neumann. M (2005), 'Driving consumer acceptance of mobile marketing: A theoretical framework and empirical study', Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Vol 6 (3) , 181-192

The mobile news, (2008)' BBC News is the UK's top mobile destination'. Available at www. mobile-ent.biz/news/32022/BBC-News-is-top-UK-mobile-destination


The independent news. Available at www.independent.co.uk/students/magazine/the-future-of-mobile-phones-a-remote-control-for-you-life

Student life

E-marketing:From E-ducation to E-business

With the global traffic on Internet increasing daily, it is imperative for universities to consider the module very relevant because it will help reposition student face global challenges in e-commerce and e-business as well as been dynamic in making decisions that have to do with internet marketing.

Moreover, universities use e-marketing module to test the success rate of their internal e-commerce business which they achieve through posting it on the intranet (for instance CU online of Coventry University website). They also use it to advertise their institution online for prospective students who are interested in studying in Coventry University.

E-marketing module in universities enables students to have a view of the new innovation in technology as well as its practical applications to business since most 21st century business revolve around e-business. Organisations buy and sell products by sharing databases online and hiring employees (Carolyn, 2004:5). Having seen how important this is to business world, it now leaves institutions with the task of teaching this module very well in order to equip their students to face the global challenge and competitiveness in the business world.

As e-marketing course has been in institutions for a while, the teaching pattern has remained a source of debate among scholars. Whichever method adopted, its pedagogical approach should be based more on implementation. Face to face medium of teaching should be imbibed as research shows that student prefer that more. (Sweeny & Ingram 2002)
Below are three critical learning methods which can be adopted:
•Critical Thinking
•Integrative Learning
•Memory Learning

Critical Thinking is a process of actively analysing, synthesizing, and evaluating the thinking process and improving on it.

Integrative Learning is a learning theory describing a movement towards integrated lessons which allows students make connections across curricula (Hutchings & Shulman 1999:13).

Memory Learning is the ability to remember what we are being taught. Examples of memory learning are observation, audio-visuals etc.

Obviously, the teaching of the practical terms of e-marketing in higher institutions of learning cannot be over emphasised. However, e-marketing has much more effects in the business world.

Nowadays more and more people want to follow the modern development of technologies and innovations, especially those in business industry, because the success and profit of businesses depend on how much they can offer customers and the ability to meet them wherever they are. Most of the potential customers spend their time on Internet that is why e-business is popular and profitable and that makes e- marketing the best tool to use. E-marketing gives businesses of any size access to the mass market at an affordable price and, unlike TV or print advertising, it allows truly personalised and interactive marketing. Specific benefits of e-marketing include:

-global reach
- lower cost
- trackable, measurable results
- 24-hour marketing
- personalisation
- one-to-one marketing
- more interesting campaigns
- better conversion rate

Together, all of these aspects of e-marketing add up to more sales (http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/). More sales bring more profit. It makes e-marketing a vital part of each business. Practical examples of application of e-marketing in different industries help to understand the importance of e-marketing in business industries. Top brand communications are transforming from monologue to dialogue, from persuasion to engagement and from the push media to the pull media (Chaffey et al, 2003:311). Good examples of these are the last two TV grand prix winners at the International Advertising Awards ( Dove’s Inner Beauty and Cadbury’s Gorilla commercials that were first viewed and made popular by the online audience (canneslions.com). Companies such as Google and YouTube have become legendary brands in just a couple of years with little or no advertising budget (Weber, L. 2007:102).

Another benefit of e-marketing has been witnessed in the drastic development of the virtual business industry. From Amazon to Argos and iTunes Store, the world has seen the growth of virtual sales in which buyers make transactions with retailers without any real contact.
Virtual customer service as used by Orange telecommunication is a good example of using the internet to market services and products to both existing and prospective consumers.
E-mails have also played a major role in information dissemination from the marketers to the end users. In this case, we have some marketers that build up a database of consumer emails while others simply buy them from outside, all for the purpose of communicating brand values to the public.

References:

Siegel, Carolyn F. (2004) Internet marketing: foundations and applications. Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin.

Hutchings P & Stiuman, L (1999). The schorlarship of teaching change 31(5), 10-15

Chaffey, D., Mayer, R., Johnston, K., & Ellis-Chadwick, F., (2003) 2nd ed. Internet Marketing Strategy, Implementation and Practice.Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Weber, L. (2007) Marketing to the Social Web. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Sweeney, Jillian C. and Deborah Ingram (2002), ' A comparison of Traditional and Web-Based Tutorials in Marketing Education: An Exploratory Study,' Journal of Marketing Education, Vol.23 (1), 55-62.