HOW CAN A WEBSITE BE TRUSTED?

TRUSTWORTHINESS WITHIN WEBSITES

What does trust mean to an organisation? How can a website become more trustworthy? How can trust from consumers be measured? And how can it be encouraged?

Trust is one concept that seems obvious, but it is difficult to explain because the word “TRUST” has a wide range of interpretations for every consumer. Trust can be measured by willingness of visitors to interact with a website in some way. Rusman, Van Bruggen and Koper 2007 argue that trust is based on mental model of cognitive and emotional elements which leads to a subjective degree of belief about agent or an organisation. These belief and expectations from consumers in turn leads to a degree of willingness from the consumers (Gefen, Benbasat and Pavlou 2008).

Gill, Boies, Finegan and McNally 2006 define trust in an organisational context as the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.

Trust plays an important role in any transaction and trust is a subjective judgement that has to be made by every consumer when visiting a website. Some of the characteristics a consumer may look at in evaluating trustworthiness on a website could be the following:

· Is the website presented in a professional?

· Is the website easy to navigate?

· Do other consumers trust the website?

· Does the information on the site make sense?

· Does the website keep up with up-to-date technology such as the use of flash or Java?

Trustworthiness is not the same as trust, though both concepts are related. Trustworthiness can be explained as the belief that someone is worthy to trust. Becerra, Heard, Kremer and Denzinger 2007 explain that before evaluating a user’s trustworthiness, his/her attributes have to meet some requirements.

One way to improve trust on a website is by drawing up a checklist, because trust is irrational, an organisation can have everything right on their website, but if a consumer does not like the colour scheme of the website, he/she may trust that website less. For example, some researchers have argued that if a website has a white colour scheme the website can be trusted, but if it has a black or red colour scheme, this can’t be trusted. Bradley S 2006 explains that in allowing consumers see the inside of a business can help in increasing the trust that consumer have on the business and the website. For example, having important and necessary information’s such as “About Us” or “Timeline” to show the organisation’s history can go a long way in establishing trust with consumers who visit the website.

Now the question is how can an organisation persuade consumer’s to trust their website? Below is a simple checklist of what can be included in a website to increase the level of trust in the mind of consumers:

· Details of the organisation that owns the website, this could include the address of the organisation, phone numbers and even registration data if it is a business.

· Lack of obvious errors in spelling.

· Having out of date information on the website.

· For financial transactions, it is very important to use a secure server.

· A respectable top level domain.

· Also, having a FAQ page which will address all related issues to do with the website can make few important cases for a consumer.

Are fans able to Trust the Chelsea football club website?

Before entering into the Chelsea football club website, there is an intro page which offers fans to either enter into the main website or purchase ticket for the next game and an opportunity to open an account. Below are the strengths and weakness of Chelsea’s Football club website and some recommendation on it can be improved for fans to trust the website.

STRENGTHS

SPEED: The speed it takes to load the website is pretty fast, all flash and videos are loaded within seconds.

COLOUR SCHEME: The colour scheme for the website does represent the colour scheme for the football club itself which is Blue and White.

PRESENTATION: The website is presented in a very neat format, all the necessary information for fans need can be generated off the website. It is user friendly, as the website has videos uploaded on it which is also fast.

WEAKNESS

STRUCTURE: The structure of the website seems to have too much going on. For example, to many boxes which include information such as News, Shopping etc. All these have its own menu bar which makes it unnecessary to have a box on the home page. This makes the website cluster with too much information and fans can be de-motivated to find the information they seek.

Reference

Bradley S (2006) 'Building Trust through Transparency'[online] available from <http://www.vanseodesign.com/blog/online-business/building-trust-through-transparency/>

Gill, H., Boies, K., Finegan, J., McNally, J. (2005), "Antecedents of trust: establishing a boundary condition for the relation to propensity to trust and intention to trust", Journal of Business & Psychology, Vol. 19 No.3, pp.287-302.

Rusman, E; J. Van Bruggen and R.Koper (2007). Theoretical framework for the design and development of a personal identity profile fostering interpersonal trust in virtual project team. 6^th International workshop on social intelligence.

Gefen, D; I Benbasat and P.A Pavlou (2008). A research agenda for trust in online environments. Journal of Management information systems, 24, (4), 275-286

Becerra, G; K. Heard, R. Kremer and J. Denzinger (2007). Trust attributes, methods and uses. The workshop on trust in agent societies at the sixth international joint conference in Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. (AAMAS-2007) May15, 1-6

Online Communities...Facebook vs Video games

What is an Online Community?
Online community can mean different things to different individuals, Rheingold 1994; Wellman and Gulia 1999 explain that online community could be the idea of a group of people that are united by culture, but who do not have to live in the same country or city.
Accoding to Howard Rheingold, he described online communities as “ a cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspace.” (Rheingold, 1994, p.57)
Example of browser based communities include facebook, myspace, bebo and online video games include Lord of the Rings, Warcraft and Age of Conan. The increase of social networking or online community is increasing drastically.

What is this we call community? – Personal Community


Importance to Marketing
Marketing is a vital aspect for an organisation, either by trying to market a product or a brand, this a part that must be played in order to fulfill the set aims and objective.
• Web browser’s creates an opportunity for organisations for a more corporate advertising to reach to consumers, either by reaching consumers through their demographic profile, income, age etc all which is represented by the consumer instead of traditional advertising such as TV adverts, Radio and Billboards. More interestingly, facebook was initially created for Harvard Students, but it was expanded, which helps organisations reach a wider segment of the population worldwide.
• Online Communities are a dynamic and unique PR and Marketing tools for oraganisations.
• Online communities can assist organisations in creating brand loyalty with the consumers as well as Relational Marketing which can build personal and long lasting relationship between a product and the consumer. For example, a consumer playing a online car game might select an automobile to complete his mission for the game, with the options of automobiles made available from Honda, BMW, Jaguar, Toyota etc, that consumer might use a BMW car and win the mission. In the mind of the consumer, BMW cars might be the best, fatest, with an impressive design and technology.
• It can also help in creating a competitive differentiation for an organisation from its competitors. For example the diagram below shows CNN also a member on facebook. (Diagram of print screen of CNN facebook account)
• With the innovation of online communities this creates a direct communication for organisations. This is very important and virtal for marketing, as organisations can promote and sell products and interact directly to the consumers and even stakeholders.
• Online communities also helps in creating brand and product awarness. According to Granovetter, 1973; Kling 1996 explains that the importance of online communities to marketing is that it creates the opportunity in making new contacts, raising awarness about new products and idead and the exchange of information between a consumer and orgainsation.
• Finally, marketing a product in an online community can help increase the occurrence on search engines such as Google, Live search and Yahoo.


Possible ways to target Online Communities
An online community has become a channel for marketers to reach consumers. The traditional methods in targeting consumers have been on TV, radios, newspapers and billboards cover. A study conducted by IDC Home: The Premier Global Market Intelligence Firm (www.idc.com/uk), consumers spend 32.7 hours a week online and about 16.4 hours watching TV. This goes to show that advertising budgets will mostly be spent on internet advertising.
As a marketer, we have decided to target consumers by segmenting them into different characteristics such as age groups and income. Below shows organisations such as CNN and McDonalds having a profile on face-book to connect with its consumer and attract and target future consumers.

Young Adults

As young adults spend more time on the internet, they are also highly influenced by celebrities. Researchers such as Kamins, 1990; Till and Busler, 1998 argues that celebrities are effective endorsers. For example, the SOS (Save Our Selves www.liveearth.org ) campaign which is a global awareness campaign about climate change had a concert and was broadcasted online via MSN. The spokesperson for the advert was Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz. This method can be used to target young adults worldwide.


Both male and female young adults can be targeted through the internet, either by online advertising on websites young adults are most likely to visit, such as Google, Yahoo, Bebo, MySpace and Face-book.

The Affluent

The Affluent population are consumers with a higher purchasing power as compared to kids and young adults. These consumers’ users are much more interested in high and rich technology tools. An example of targeting these consumers was conducted by Toyota’s community site for the campaign “Hybrid Synergy Drive: Everyone has their reason” which saw consumers getting on the site, each having an avatar and connecting with other consumers to share their experience of the Toyota car.

Limitations, Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Communities

Online communities serves a lot of advantages to consumers, organisations and marketers, an organisation can gather a consumers data online, which could be cheaper as to the traditionally method. Another advantage of online community is that it is flexible, as long as there is an internet connection, information can be accessed 24/7.
The limitation with advertising in an online community such as video games is that marketers are not able to target the market the way browser based website as face book target consumers when advertising, by segmenting the market into religion, income, age distribution etc.
One good thing about online communities is that, they have come to support real world interaction. For instance many of us who are international students here at Coventry keep up with events back home on face book because it provides us timely updates with pictures of what exactly is on. Online communities also give consumers and organisation an opportunity to maintain a relationship through virtual means.
The online video games are flexible as they allow the consumer to customize the characters to suit themselves, opportunity for personalized culture, where one can freely introduce or come up with codes, languages, even money to transact business in the game which can be adapted for their virtual existence in the virtual world. Though the games are quite interesting, the disadvantage to this is that lots of productive time is invested into it and you would be amazed that game addicts revise their schedules here in reality if need be to keep up with their co gamers online.
An advantage of an online game is that the consumer does not have to live their house just to have fun, especially for teenagers.


References

Rheingold, H. (1994). A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community. In L. M. Harasim (Ed.), Global Networks: Computers and International Communication (pp. 57-80). Cambridge: MA: MIT Press

Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 78, 1360-1380.

Kling, R. (1996). Social Relationships in Electronic Forums: Hangouts, Salons, Workplaces and Communities. In R. Kling (Ed.), Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices (Second Edition) . San Diego: CA: Academic Press.

Wellman, B., & Gulia, M. (1999a). Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone. In B. Wellman (Ed.), Networks in the Global Village (pp. 331-366). Boulder: CO: Westview Press.

Kamins, M. A. (1990). An investigation into the "match-up" hypothesis in celebrity advertising: When beauty may be only skin deep. Journal of Advertising, 19(1), 4-13.

Till, B. D., & Busler, M. (1998).Matching products with endorsers: Attractiveness versus expertise. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 15(6), 576-586.

MAKE LIFE MORE EASIER WITH MOBILE PHONE AND IDTV APPLICATIONS

The mobile web has become a phenomenon, now the question is “why carry a laptop everywhere you go when you can access the internet on a little device?” Why spend so much money on a laptop and pay for internet access when you can access the internet on your mobile phone with a 3G or 4G connection? Granted using a pc has its advantage in having a larger amount of storage and memory, it’s easier to create a document or graphic design. Personally, it could be argued that having a pc could be a back-up plan while a mobile phone travels around with the individual.
Not only can you access the internet from a mobile phone, but it can also be accessed on an IDTV and a games console such as PlayStation 2 and 3 and even an Xbox. IDTV also known as “Interactive Digital TV” has a huge potential and changes the way the audience use TV.
IDTV is different; it delivers more channels, better pictures and more interaction. For marketers, this means better targeting and immediate opportunities to sell, to collect data and to develop relationships. The IDTV can be seen as a “lean back” medium where relaxation dominates, where as a PC is more of a “lean forward” interactive medium.
According to a report on Reuters in 2007, world wide mobile phones subscriptions reached 3.3 billion users, compared to the television usage which was about 1.5 billion users and desktop internet usage 1.1 billion users. This goes to show the potential of internet access on mobiles phones and on IDTV in the future.
The BBC also reported that the trend of internet access on mobile phones is also penetrating into developing countries, according to the report 61% of its international WAP user came from Nigeria and 19% from South Africa. This goes to show that the internet access via mobile phones has a potential to be a truly mass online medium.

FACTORS THAT DRIVE INTERNET ACCESS ON MOBILE PHONES

The world is one that is constantly changing and always on the move, it is also necessary for individuals to be on the move. To be able to access their e-mail, latest news, browse onto social and business networking sites such as Face-book and Bebo.

It is also easier to access the internet via a handset; many phone providers create friendly and colourful, yet attractive handset. Also, the entry level features for phones are rising with high resolutions and colourful screens. For example, Nokia and Blackberry.