eBay is exuberantly jumping into social media with the launch eBay Blogs and the eBay Community Wiki and other community tools…
…that herald the largest corporate move into Web 2.0 to date. eBay will launch the new sellers’ marketing tools at the sold out eBay Live conference that more than 10,000 people are set to attend in Las Vegas on June 13-15, according to Ina Steiner at Auctionbytes blog.
Clearly, eBay understands that selling on the Internet is about creating community and engaging in credible conversation, and not about whacking buyers over the head with heavy-handed sales speak. Providing the community-building tools for sellers involves a massive education campaign that other sales sites, from Yahoo stores to department stores will have to catch up with quickly or be left behind in the dust.
However, and it’s a big caveat, it remains to be seen whether eBay will allow the creation of true community or just go through the motions by restricting how the tools can be used. Integrating eBay with a social network like MySpace or even Soflow would add an important dimension. Instead, the company is re-inventing the wheel.
The eBay site is rife with information, instruction and tools for social media from blogs to wikis, to RSS feeds and tagging. The new blogs will be located at http://blogs.ebay.com, which is not yet live.
Tags: Web_2.0
An awesome spot and seemingly an under-publicised one at that from looking on Technorati.
People made great noises about eBay buying Skype (for the very same reasons you make above), so blogs and wikis are the next logical step – after all, the world’s largest community needs to use all the tools available to it to make sure it remains so.
What would stop myspace setting up a trading system? The trust element is there with a lot of users already very close.
My only fear is that with eBay, if you use the wrong word on the third day of the month whilst wearing black jeans, you tend to find your auctions pulled! Ok, an exaggeration, but a valid point that with so much expected content likely to crop up eBay is either going to have to employ hundreds more monitors (or programmers to run the monitors!) and watch the wiki’s like a hawk.
One thing I do have an issue with is where the beenfit of a wiki would come when the forums are so highly populated? Are there more tools in the pipeline?
Finally, if eBay thinks it has a secure fraud system in place (and clearly has something even if it is not water-tight) will the new tools not simply provide another medium for the fraudtsers to launch themselves? Wikipedia works because it takes a more mature mentality to want to contribute to it – to serve the community. eBay doesn’t.
A great move and one I am genuinely looking forwward to, but I fear the scamsters and information products geeks are going to spoil it.