How eBay is Embracing Social Media in the Workplace
by Kelly KassA real crowd-pleaser at this year’s employee communications summit was a presentation by Tobias Huebscher, one of the talented people heading up eBay’s Internal Comms team in
Tobias walked attendees through some of the exciting things going on at eBay – the force behind Skype, PayPal and StubHub – and also provided an impressive list of stats about the company. While hearing about the 4 million items sold in a day worldwide and 20 billion page views per month, I quietly began to feel ashamed that I’ve never bought or sold anything on eBay.
Inside the organization, when it comes to connecting employees, Tobias admits that eBay practices a bit of “window shopping” – studying sites like Facebook and YouTube that promote and inspire social networking.
Connecting Your People
“If we look at how people connect nowadays, we’re not looking at them like employees, we’re looking at them as people. What do they do? They use Flickr to upload their pictures and share their photos. LinkedIn helps them to maintain their professional network; YouTube (we’ve seen at least 15 videos here over the last two days) – that’s another way for people to connect,” Tobias points out.
Perhaps the most critical point covered by Tobias is how companies can successfully engage their employees to join in the conversations and adapt to social media. He advises to get to know your people and promote content that promotes interactivity. However, the content can’t be rubbish. “If the content is weak, social media can’t help you,” he warns.
During his lively session, Tobias gave the audience a peek into eBay’s iChannel which runs on their intranet powered by SharePoint. Among the videos currently appearing on the user-generated content-rich site is “Ask a Leader”- where employees can interact with Management to help them improve their business communication. iChannel also works as a discussion board where eBay’s CEO recently fielded questions from employees inquiring about the rumors of a possible Skype sale. To promote initiatives and programs, virtual screensavers are often used on the site.
Much like on MySpace, all eBay employees are encouraged to set up profiles on the company intranet and also have the opportunity to distinguish the types of stories they want to read about. Profile pages offer fellow employees a glimpse into their lives and what makes them tick. Employees also have the ability to link to other co-workers who share the same interests and can also blog if they wish to do so – “a good way to link business communication and people’s personal interests,” Tobias points out. Tobias himself recently uploaded a post about his quest to score Euro Cup tickets.
The eBay Film Festival
An interesting part of Tobias’ presentation was a behind-the-scenes account of eBay’s renowned film festival of employee-produced, user-generated videos. Blog posts helped to generate interest in the event, as well as the ability for employees to vote for their favorite films. According to Tobias, holding such a festival is a great way to “leverage the creative talent of your people.” And the winner: A customer service representative in eBay’s
Executives and Social Media
So what about the higher-ups? How can they embrace social media? When it comes to blogging, Tobias holds up a red flag. “I’m not a believer in executive blogs,” he admits. Often the content does not relate to what people want to read about. The biggest indication? The lack of comments on the blog. “If it doesn’t work, if no one is commenting, then kill it,” Tobias advises.
Podcasting
When it comes to podcasting, Tobias encourages finding the right personalities to step in front of the mic. The more outspoken your host, the better the podcast will be. At eBay, the CEO presents a monthly webcast where he addresses various topics concerning employees. Implementing such a channel is a great way to keep your executives on top of issues they probably didn’t even know exist, Tobias points out. Wearing casual attire will help make bosses more accessible to employees and most importantly, he says, “don’t podcast too often or else it’ll wear people out.”
For highlights of Tobias’ presentation at Ragan and Simply’s 2008 International Employee Communications Summit,
Hear more from Tobias in my one-on-one interview.
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