Internet Marketing
Lecture notes prepared by Miss Varuna
June 24, 2009
Use of web blogs in Marketing
Bloggers are people with attitude. They say there’s a book inside everybody. Well, the Web
and blogs have let the book out! There has literally been an explosion of opinion.
Traditionally, public relations were about honing a silvery message that communicated
exactly what the organization wanted us to hear. Now, we can hear all sorts of voices on the
subject. It’s true democracy at work.
The advantages of blogs from an organizational perspective include the following:
1. The consumer and citizen are potentially better informed and this can only be good
for the long-term health of our societies and economies.
2. Blogs have potential to help the organization develop stronger relationships and brand
loyalty with its customers, as they interact with the ‘human face’ of the organization
through blogs.
3. Blogs, in an intranet environment, can be an excellent way of sharing knowledge
within the organization.
4. Blogs can be a positive way of getting feedback, and keeping your finger on the pulse,
as readers react to certain pieces, suggest story ideas, etc.
5. Blogs can build the profile of the writer, showcasing the organization as having talent
and expertise.
The disadvantages of blogs are:
1. Most people don’t have very much to say that’s interesting, and/or are unable to write
down their ideas in a compelling and clear manner.
2. I have often found that the people who have most time to write have least to say, and
the people who have most to say don’t have enough time to write it. Thus, the real
expertise within the organization lays hidden, as you get drowned in trivia.
3. Like practically everything else on the Web, blogs are easy to start and hard to
maintain. Writing coherently is one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks for
a human being to undertake. So, far from blogs being a cheap strategy, they are a very
expensive one, in that they eat up time. As a result, many blogs are not updated, thus
damaging rather than enhancing the reputation of the organization.
4. Organizations are not democracies. The Web makes many organizations look like
disorganizations, with multiple tones and opinions. Contrary to what some might
think, the average customer prefers it if the organization they are about to purchase
from is at least somewhat coherent.
As the World Wide Web has developed considerable bargaining power has been transferred
from suppliers to consumers; there is a real need to improve market intelligence and market
research for private and public tourism organisations and facilitate timely consumer decision
making.
Tourism organisations cannot afford to ignore the development of user generated content,
peer-to-peer web applications and virtual communities. A recent survey found that consumers
trusted more websites with reviews than professional guides and travel agencies and far from
being an irrelevance, blogs are often perceived to be more credible and trustworthy than
traditional marketing communications. But there is a problem: given the sheer number of
possibly relevant travel blogs there is a need to locate, extract and interpret blog content and
this has proven so far to be time consuming, exhausting and costly, thus negating the relative
value of the information obtained. A way forward may be the use of artificial intelligence and
“opinion mining” or a blog visualisation system.
Customer loyalty
As with any other information system (IS), the success of online shopping depends largely on
customer satisfaction and other factors that will eventually increase customers' loyalty
intentions. An article integrated two major variables of technology acceptance model (TAM),
trust, and fairness to construct a model for investigating the motivations behind customers'
loyalty intentions towards online shopping. The hypothesised model is validated empirically
using data collected from 311 customers of an online shopping store. The results indicated
that distributive, procedural and interactional fairness were strong predictors of trust, which
in turn influenced satisfaction. Distributive fairness and interactional fairness exhibited
significant positive effects on satisfaction. Perceived usefulness and satisfaction influenced
loyalty intention towards online shopping. Perceived ease of use acts indirectly on loyalty
intention through the mediating effect of perceived usefulness. Implications for theory and
practice and future research directions are discussed.
DATA PROTECTION ISSUES
People often talk about the Data Protection Act, but in reality few people know very much
about it. It is a very powerful piece of legislation aimed at protecting consumers against the
unlawful handling of their personal information, and one which provides rights and remedies
if you suffer damage or distress as a result.
The responsibilities of companies and organizations
The Data Protection Act requires that any organization which handles or processes personal
data must comply with eight data protection principles – which personal information is:
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Fairly and lawfully processed
Processed for limited purposes
Adequate, relevant and not excessive
Accurate and up to date
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Not kept for longer than is necessary
Processed in line with your rights
Secure
Not transferred to other countries without adequate protection
In practice this means that if an organization causes you additional expense or long term
inconvenience as a result of incorrect personal information about you, that organization
would be in breach of the Data protection Act and liable to pay you compensation.
The rights of individuals
One of the principle purposes of the Data Protection Act is to give individuals the right to
know and control what data is stored and how it is used. Therefore if you are in any way
curious or suspicious as to what information organizations might hold on file about you, you
have the right to make a Subject Access Request. This is a simple request in writing to the
organization you believe to be holding or processing the data. Your request must include the
relevant fee (maximum £10) and the reply must be received within 40 days. Many Subject
Access Requests are made to credit reference agencies, so that people can find out about their
various credit ratings. In this case, the fee is only £2 and a reply must be received within 7
days.
In addition to the right to know what information exists about you, you also have the right to
request that inaccurate or inappropriate personal details be corrected or removed, or that
personal information not be processed at all, if it leads to significant damage or distress on
your part. But even in the absence of damage or distress, you can still stop all processing of
your personal data for direct marketing purposes by writing to the company which is
targeting you and requesting they take your details off their mailing lists.
Most common ways in which companies breach the Data Protection Act
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If companies mix up your details with someone else and wrongly charge you –
typically telecoms and utility companies
Where you have been refused credit as a result of the wrong information given by a
credit reference agency
CCTV without warning signage
Recorded or monitored telephone calls without warning
Taking further action
If you feel an organization you’ve had dealings with is in breach of any of the 8 principles
listed above, perhaps because you are being denied access to personal information they hold
about you, or this information is inaccurate or being handled improperly, your first course of
action must be to write to the data processor for the company itself (there must be a contact
postal address on the website or correspondence). If you are unsure as to whether there has
been a breach, or the organization is simply not responding to a request you have made, you
should ask the Information Commissioner’s Office to undertake an Assessment Procedure.
The Outcome of the Assessment is usually enough to force the organization to comply, if it
isn’t, the ICO can take enforcement action. Under the act, if you can show the improper
handling of personal data has caused damage or distress to you, you have the right to claim
compensation through the courts.
The Data Protection Act is a very powerful piece of legislation as far as consumer rights are
concerned – when it is mentioned, companies usually listen. However, it is also very much
under-utilised and few people exercise their rights or invoke the assessment procedure which
is offered by the ICO.
Preventing junk mailing or cold calling as a whole
In accordance with the Data Protection Act, most firms’ marketing departments have to
comply with the principles of the Data Protection Act in terms of how they deal with personal
data. Nobody likes to receive excessive amounts of junk mail, and it is your right not to
receive any. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) runs the Mailing Preference Service
and the Telephone Preference Service. If you apply to have your details (and the details of
anybody else living in your household) put on the list, most firms will pay reference to this
list when sending out marketing material.
Use of Online surveys
Data Collection Efficiency and Quality
The greatest strengths of Internet survey data collection are the potential to collect a large
amount of data in a relatively short amount of time, and the elimination of the necessity for
researchers to enter or process the data. After creating the questionnaire, placing it online,
and recruiting subjects, a researcher’s primary data collection efforts are complete. Hundreds
of respondents can fill out the survey within a matter of days, and all of these responses can
be automatically inserted into a database such as Microsoft Access. Data from web-based
questionnaires can also be automatically validated; for example, if a data value is entered in
an incorrect format, or outside a defined range, the web-based program can return an error
message requesting the respondent to enter the data correctly and resubmit the questionnaire.
If such validation capabilities are used, the researcher need not worry about issues of missing
or out-of-range responses, and can proceed directly to preliminary analysis of the data. (It
should be noted, however, that automatic data validation cannot guarantee the veracity of
respondents' answers.)