Thanks for your patience this last week while I was out on the road. Before I get into that recap, I wanted to acknowledge that the Tests to Feedback post from Brian Burke is approaching 100 comments and it’s high time we got some responses or acknowledgments to the points made from people on there. I apologize to you for the radio silence. Believe me, it frustrates me just as much as it does you. For those of you who haven’t seen before, my core goals of eBay Ink are as follows:

1. Tell this company’s story in our words and in our voice.

2. Provide new levels of access to all layers of the company (from the top down).

3. Capture and share/show the people behind the brand (and their stories).

4. Demonstrate a willingness to talk openly/transparently about eBay operations and business decisions.

5. Open up new feedback channels online and show that we’re willing to both listen and engage in dialogue about our business.

I have the above printed and posted to my cube wall so I’m constantly reminded about my charter here at eBay. Unfortunately, I really feel that the lack of two-way conversation on that blog post in particular is unacceptable. I’m working to remedy. In the meantime, I wanted to share what I’ve been up to for the past 6 days…

140tc Twitter Conference
The first ever Twitter-focused conference (believe it or not there are 5 or 6 scheduled for this Summer) was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View over 2 days last week. Brand representatives using Twitter that were in attendance included JetBlue, Yahoo!, GoDaddy, Dominos Pizza, Safeway, Intel, and Intuit. It was a single track conference and I counted approximately 300-400 people in the audience at any given time.

I joined ZDNet‘s network security expert, Jennifer Leggio, and Yahoo!’s legal director of global brand protection, Jonathan Matkowsky on a panel on day one focused on the potential issues around Twitter implementation and possible resolutions. I focused on our internal education of Twitter (and social media in general) to different groups within the organization – with an emphasis on the legal team and our SEC efforts.

On the second day of the conference I was invited to join an impromptu OpenBrands panel during the lunch session. It was me, Morgan Johnston of @JetBlue, and Phil of Domino’s Pizza @dpzinfo. Morgan emphasized the scaling issues he’s dealing with and I addressed the back-and-forth dialogue we’ve created through Twitter.

Richard Brewer-Hay at 140tc panel

WordCampSF 2009
I attended WordCamp on Saturday. WordCamp is a one-day conference (they hold them year-round all over the world) devoted to developers and users of WordPress for their blogging tools. eBay Ink is built on WordPress so I wanted to get the latest and greatest on what was coming out for my blog. It’s also one of my favorite conferences because of the sense of comradeship and collaboration around it. I attended my first WordCamp back in 2007 and still consider it one of my favorite events. Of course, selfishly, the highlight for me this year was seeing Ink get profiled on the stage during the WordCamp Showcase portion of the day:

eBay Ink Blog featured at WordCamp SF

TWTRCON
I spent my Sunday at the Nikko hotel in San Francisco attending TWTRCON09. Like the 140tc before it, the conference offered another opportunity to interact with peers and mentors that I’d otherwise only spoken to in cyberspace. Highlights for me were MC Hammer‘s honesty and thoughtfulness, Frank Eliason’s (aka @comcastcares) passion and insight and Steve Rubel‘s unconventional but visionarymind mapping presentation toward the end of the day.

I spoke on a panel with Laura Fitton, Founder of Pistachio Consulting, Jeannette Gibson, Director of New Media for Cisco, and Brian Solis, Principal at FutureWorks. We discussed the needs of brands and companies involved with Web 2.0 solutions to have best-practices and guidelines in place to get the most out of those tools. I was getting pretty delirious at this point I believe because I made an analogy comparing blogging on behalf of a brand or a company to bartending without the beer. All I’ll say is that it made a lot of sense to me when I said it and I’m sticking to it.

I had a bit of an epiphany at some point over the weekend. I had gone into the events selfishly looking forward to extrapolating information that I could then use to improve what we’re trying to accomplish here with our eBay Ink blog and family of blogs. However, at some point I found myself thinking like a small seller or online business owner. For instance, what would Kat’s Kloset LLC or an eBay education specialist like PowerWheelerChris get out of these events? Then, as I started compiling my takeaways and key quotes, I realized that the takeaways were pretty much guided by the same principles. So, here’s what I took away from the events…

Takeaways

1. All the same scaling issues we’re experiencing here with our social media programs are being faced by pretty much every company out there. If you don’t have the resources in place to be a part of the conversation then you’re setting yourself up for failure. My immediate needs see me building out a team here so we can get more content up on the blog, have people engaged in the comments section of posts, and get different parts of our business involved in the conversation, regardless of the platform (user groups, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

2. There are existing tools out there that we need to evaluate and implement so we can better manage our social media programs. For example, specific to Twitter, Co-Tweet, hootsuite, tweetfunnel, chatterbox and PeopleBrowsr are five that I got to demo. I need to play with each more thoroughly before identifying the differentiators.

3. eBay needs to establish a social media certification program. We’ve already established an employee policy and best practices guide. We even have social media guidelines specific to corporate disclosure. Now we need to give employees the tools to be successful. For example, Intel acknowledges its Social Media Center of Excellence, in its social media guidelines that hosts Digital IQ training for employees before they’re authorized to use a public communication tool on behalf of the company. 800 employees have already gone through that program.

Key Quotes:

@Palm_Inc: “Asking who own’s social media is like asking ‘Who owns paper?’ in a company. Ask who owns the strategy.”

@JetBlue: “My opinion is that a PR voice should be communicating via social media (it represents the company).”

@JetBlue: “You don’t own social media. You only interact with it.”

@jowyang: “Fish where your fish are… determine if your customers are on Twitter before you decide to use it.”

@jowyang: “Twitter has mainstream media awareness but does not have mainstream adoption. Yet.”

Some things I said:

@ebayinkblog: “I want eBay Ink Blog to not only be the voice of the company, but a trusted voice in ecommerce in general.”

@ebayinkblog: “Those who love the brand are less likely to communicate that fact than those who are not happy.”

@ebayinkblog: “blogging & tweeting to your customers is like bartending without the beer. You listen to customer stories in a 1:1 dialogue and you encourage them to want to come back again.”

Not sure who said them, but wanted to share these too:

“MySpace is for people you don’t want to know. FaceBook is for people you used to know. Twitter is for people you want to know.”

“Biggest takeaway from #twtrcon: be an authentic personality, pay attention to what your audience is saying, and provide something valuable.”

“Man cannot live on Tweets alone. Must be a part of a diversified social web strategy.”

To follow the Twitter conversation that came out of 140tc, click here.
To follow the Twitter conversation that came out of WordCampSF, click here.
To follow the Twitter conversation that came out of TWTRCON, click here.

Photo credit: Jerad Hill Photography

I leave for the eCommerce Summit tomorrow morning. For those following me on Twitter, I’ll be using the hashtag #ecom09 for all my updates.

Cheers!
RBH