• Can Brotherhood be Sold Like Soap…Online? An Online Social Marketing and Advocacy Pilot Study Synopsis

      Cugelman, Brian; Thelwall, Mike; Dawes, Philip L. (SpringerLink, 2007)
      Having engaged one billion users by early 2006, the Internet is the world’s fastest-growing mass communications medium. As it permeates into countless lives across the planet, it offers social campaigners an opportunity to deploy interactive interventions that encourage populations to adopt healthy living, environmental protection and community development behaviours. Using a classic set of social campaigning criteria, this paper explores relationships between social campaign websites and behavioural change.
    • Commercial Web sites: lost in cyberspace?

      Thelwall, Mike (MCB UP Ltd, 2000)
      How easy are business Web sites for potential customers to find? This paper reports on a survey of 60,087 Web sites from 42 of the major general and commercial domains around the world to extract statistics about their design and rate of search engine registration. Search engines are used by the majority of Web surfers to find information on the Web. However, 23 per cent of business Web sites in the survey were not registered at all in the five major search engines tested and 82 per cent were not registered in at least one, missing a sizeable potential audience. There are some simple steps that should also be taken to help a Web site to be indexed properly in search engines, primarily the use of HTML META tags for indexing, but only about a third of the site home pages in the survey used them. Wide national variations were found for both indexing and META tag inclusion.
    • Factors affecting the success of business-to-business international Internet marketing (B-to-B IIM): an empirical study of UK companies

      Eid, Riyad; Trueman, Myfanwy (Emerald, 2004)
      Business-to-business international Internet marketing is one of the key drivers in sustaining an organisation’s competitive advantage. The challenge for organisations today is to understand the factors that play a critical role in utilising Internet capabilities and their implications on business strategic objectives to enable them to compete successfully in the electronic age. Proposes 33 critical factors classified into five categories and validated empirically through a sample of 123 UK companies. Discusses the significance, importance and implications for each category and makes recommendations.
    • Making Business-to-Business International Internet Marketing Effective: A Study of Critical Factors Using a Case-Study Approach

      Eid, Riyad; Elbeltagi, Ibraheem; Zairi, Mohamed (American Marketing Association, 2006)
      The recent phenomenal growth in business activities dependent on the Internet has demonstrated that various potential advantages could be derived from using information and communication technology platforms. The Internet has enabled firms to reach out to global markets and has provided them with the opportunity to customize their strategies and offerings in an unprecedented way. These recent developments provide an exciting opportunity for research to study the dynamics involved in international Internet marketing (IIM) and, in particular, to examine closely the factors that could influence success in using this new technology for IIM activities. Using a business-to-business context and a multiple-case-study approach, this article focuses on two main areas of study: (1) the critical examination of the literature and identification of the most important factors that have a significant influence on business-to-business IIM and (2) the first-hand verification of how the identified factors are implemented in various organizational contexts.