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

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