eBay is one of the longest-running communities born out of the digital age. Luckily we got the chance to sit down with Alan Aisbitt who has been at eBay for over 9 years and has been a community manager since 2013. Community is everything for eBay, it’s a pure marketplace that relies on their buyers and sellers which are the community members. Their C2C community has grown very organically because passionate sellers who want to meet other sellers in their area will host events in their city to help support the local community. eBay knows that support the power members of your community is a smart thing to do so they keep tabs on cities that are gaining traction with their events and reach out to support them. They support them by providing content, news on product updates, swag or even eBay staff going on the road to meet the sellers. As far as what they measure for success they look at a few metrics including unique visitors, overall growth of users, posts and levels of activity. One of the metrics that's unique to them is their “accepted solutions” and “kudos”, an “accepted solution” is when a user marks their question as solved and “kudos” is similar to likes on social media. With those metrics, they are able to see not just quantity but the quality of the activity that their community is putting out. Of course, it’s always good to prove the worth of the community from as many angles and perspectives as possible. One way that eBay does this is through their “voice of the customer” report. They take an incredible story every week from one of the customers in their community and then turn that into a report that they send to senior leaders. Sharing these helps create meaningful change that the community team can then bring back to the community and show that their voices actually matters. Alan strongly suggested any community team create a report like this because it’s a great touchpoint from inside the company and great for the community as well.
eBay is one of the longest-running communities born out of the digital age. Luckily we got the chance to sit down with Alan Aisbitt who has been at eBay for over 9 years and has been a community manager since 2013.
Community is everything for eBay, it’s a pure marketplace that relies on their buyers and sellers which are the community members. Their C2C community has grown very organically because passionate sellers who want to meet other sellers in their area will host events in their city to help support the local community.
eBay knows that support the power members of your community is a smart thing to do so they keep tabs on cities that are gaining traction with their events and reach out to support them. They support them by providing content, news on product updates, swag or even eBay staff going on the road to meet the sellers.
As far as what they measure for success they look at a few metrics including unique visitors, overall growth of users, posts and levels of activity. One of the metrics that's unique to them is their “accepted solutions” and “kudos”, an “accepted solution” is when a user marks their question as solved and “kudos” is similar to likes on social media. With those metrics, they are able to see not just quantity but the quality of the activity that their community is putting out.
Of course, it’s always good to prove the worth of the community from as many angles and perspectives as possible. One way that eBay does this is through their “voice of the customer” report. They take an incredible story every week from one of the customers in their community and then turn that into a report that they send to senior leaders. Sharing these helps create meaningful change that the community team can then bring back to the community and show that their voices actually matters. Alan strongly suggested any community team create a report like this because it’s a great touchpoint from inside the company and great for the community as well.