Within the fields of e-health and persuasive technology, research indicates that intervention websites can motivate people to adopt healthy behaviours, such as quitting smoking, exercising more, and eating better. Frequently, these online interventions are individually tailored programmes, resembling two-way interpersonal therapy. It is now conceivable that health campaigners can deploy mass-interpersonal campaigns, where online media are used to engage large populations in automated personal relationships, similar to relationships people have with their doctors, councillors, trainers, and trusted friends.

If you were trying to identify the factors that could explain why a given online health intervention works, its efficacy may be attributed to source credibility, ingenious tailoring algorithms, argument quality, the vividness of imagery used, fear appeals or how audiences relate to the communication style. All or some of these factors may account for the intervention’s effectiveness or ineffectiveness; however, when trying to describe interventions, there is no comprehensive way of conceptualizing the many factors, nor a universal taxonomy of influence effects appropriate to the design of online behavioural change interventions.

This paper discusses two trends that threaten to undermine the effectiveness of online social marketing interventions: growing mistrust and competition. As a solution, this paper examines the relationships between website credibility, target audiences’ active trust and behaviour.

Using structural equation modelling to evaluate two credibility models, this study concludes that website credibility is best considered a three-dimensional construct composed of expertise, trustworthiness and visual appeal, and that trust plays a partial mediating role between website credibility and behavioural impacts.

Source credibility is a key factor that can impact whether audiences believe a proposition, while trust is a key factor that can influence a person’s willingness to act on advice. In this blog post, I’ll discuss the historical use of source credibility in persuasion, present a humorous example of how the tobacco industry abused credibility appeals from 1920-1950, and finally, discuss why online credibility is important in the design of online outreach campaigns.

Presentation to the World Social Marketing Conference, Brighton, UK, 30 September 2008.
As the Internet continues expanding across the planet, social marketers are progressively moving online, not just because of potential time and cost savings, but because increasingly, this is where their target audiences are easily reached. Although the Internet is becoming a key part of social marketing campaigns within industrialized nations, researches suggest that many behavioral change websites are ill equipped to impact on behavior, while only a few published works discuss social marketing on the Internet. Much e-commerce literature has examined the relationship between website trustworthiness and users’ purchasing behavior. Examining these relationships in a non-profit marketing context, this presentation examines the relationship between website source credibility, users’ trusting attitudes and their behavioral intentions.

In this discussion, we explore the feasibility of applying e-marketing web analytics and concepts to online social marketing interventions and e-Research initiatives. E-marketers frequently use web data, analytics packages and financial measures to optimize websites for customer engagement and sales. Although many online social marketers already use web analytics tools, they do not seem to conduct online social marketing with the same costing and behavioural frameworks used on e-commerce websites.

Over 50 years ago, the psychologist G. D. Wiebe asked the question ‘Can brotherhood be sold like soap?' In his paper, ‘Merchandising Commodities and Citizenship on Television', Wiebe proposed that organizations which successfully ‘sell' intangible social objects-such as goodwill, respect for the environment or community development-would be more successful if they sold their social objects the way marketers sell sports cars or mouth wash. To test this notion, Wiebe developed a set of five criteria (Table 1) and used them to evaluate how social campaigns compared to commercial marketing practices. After evaluating four social campaigns by his five criteria, Wiebe concluded that the more social campaigns resembled commercial marketing practices, the better their chance of success.