Social Media @ eBay – Intranet Hub for employees

eBay initially rejected its employees request for an enterprise social network and employees were forced to set up their own network on Yammer, a private company that provides the platform for employees of a business to easily setup a free enterprise social network with limited features and functions for that business. The businesses have the option of take over the Yammer network being used by their employees by paying the necessary fees and upgrading their accounts. When eBay management realized that there are significant numbers of employees (around 3,000 employees) are actively engaging on the Yammer network they too considered to take over the network and upgrade by paying the necessary fees but decided not to do so as the Yammer did not have many features and functions that eBay wanted. eBay then decided to develop its own official enterprise social network using NewsGator, an add-on to Microsoft SharePoint and which will be a state of the art platform that will not only accelerate the platform usage by employees but also helps in improving the productivity and performance of the employees. Before finalizing the platform eBay also evaluated other platforms like Jive, Ning, and Chatter but finalized the NewsGator and SharePoint as SharePoint is easy to be integrated with other tools and platforms within the organization IT infrastructure.

With more than 16,000 employees across the globe, eBay created an intranet called the Hub that not only helps employees to perform their jobs in better way but also engages employees with an simple, friendly design and consistent with company identity.  The intranet is also a hub for meetings and company wide events like corporate news, videos, messages, analyst presentations, executive presentations etc and also plays a key role in internal communications with employees that feature blogs, forums, video/photo sharing and discussion boards. Each employee in the company has their own profile page which they can personalize with personal information, upload their photos, engage with other employees who share similar interests and create their own blog and other media. The intranet platform also allows employees to post and receive updates from intranet to multiple internal or external networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc at the push of a button. iChannel is You Tube styled video sharing platform that runs on the eBay intranet and works as a discussion board and communication channel between the employees and management ( Ask a Leader) and recently this channel is used by the CEO to clarify the employee concerns about Skype sale. eBay adopted a test and learn methodology which will help in refining and developing an effective platform that will be easy to use for the employees.

This intranet platform was initially tested with 1000 employees and in November 2011 went live for all the eBay employees. But the intranet is of no use without employees having their profiles uploaded and their active participation and with an aim to encourage the employee participation eBay started a contest called “Hubgrade” that gave eBay employees a chance to win Starbucks gift cards or the grand prize an Xbox. This helped in increasing the employee profiles by more than six times and employees started actively participating in the intranet and build communities, search for information, and even post status updates to the corporate network, LinkedIn, Twitter , etc simultaneously. With rise in participation by the employees’ eBay also launched a innovative mobile application through which the employees can access the intranet Hub away from office which allows to employee directory, meeting schedules, locations and other information access to the information. eBay is using various promotional initiatives like contests, virtual screen savers, training, etc to further increase the employee engagement on the intranet Hub. More active employees with complete profiles will help in the employee’s communication with one another for work, knowledge sharing, common interests/hobbies, collaborate for work and other projects and also improve the overall organizational performance along with their individual performance.

eBay is world’s largest online market place that connects millions of buyers and sellers and company has more than 100million active users globally. Other businesses in the portfolio include PayPal, StubHub, Shopping.com and others where millions of people to buy, sell, and pay online.  The company actively participates on various social networking sites for engaging with their customers and also wanted to provide their employees the similar social networking styled platform internally for increasing employee engagement, collaboration and effectiveness. eBay wanted a platform that will enhance employee performance and also help them in actively improving the organizational performance. Even though the company initially had apprehensions about the effectiveness of the social media styled intranet but the employees convinced the management and started working on the development of the intranet in September 2010. eBay believes that this social intranet initiative will improve collaboration and communication and plays a crucial role in employee retention as the company has to invest significant amounts of time, money and resources in training and inducting employees into the company. The company is hoping to use the social media and networks more effectively for both the employee and organizational benefits.