eBay has just taken another leap into online commerce, with the launch of their new service called eBay Group Gifts.  The move was  no doubt eBay’s way of letting us all know that they plan to ‘stay current’ and further expand out past their auction and classifieds brands, which they are so widely known for.

The eBay Group Gift service has taken the world of online social interaction and fused it in with the act of gift buying, primarily through the services relationship with Facebook.  The way it works is that once accessing the Group Gift site, you can enter the gift recipients name or connect to Facebook to find a recipient on your friends list.  Connecting to Facebook will allow you to take advantage of the services targeted suggestions, based on your Facebook friends (the intended gift recipient) likes.  Once you’ve selected the friend and an item to give them (only eBay’s ‘buy it now’ items apply), you let Group Gift know how much of the purchase price you are willing to kick in and of course input your Pay Pal information.  (You need a Pay Pal account to start a Group Gift, but those contributing to the gift do not).  Once that’s done, you can ask others to help raise the money to purchase the gift.  You can email contributors, post the item to your Facebook News Feed, or publish the URL on sites such as Twitter; all great methods to let related friends and family know that their monetary donations, to said gift, is welcomed.   Those willing to contribute will add funds into your Pay Pal account and once all the funds are collected, eBay’s Group Gift service will send you an eCard, with well wishes from all of the contributors, which you then of course will send to the intended recipient.

Given what the holidays or work retirement parties can be like, this will probably prove to be a great idea, if it is widely publicised and let’s face it,  there is no better time to launch a service like this than now, given that the holidays are right around the corner.

Each post holiday season we sit back and marvel at the numbers sites such as Amazon were able to bring in.  I wonder where eBay’s Group Gift service will fall in the mix?  I guess it depends on how much or even what eBay is willing to do to drive awareness.  One thing is clear though, I believe more grass roots, not nameplate merchants, will start to use social commerce or at lease be introduced to the idea through eBay’s Group Gift service, and that may not be a bad thing for customers looking to take advantage of current technologies and embedded rules of commerce, which usually equate to convenience.

Check out this info video on eBay’s Group Gift service.

WWE Has Social Media Guidelines. Do You? See Our Tips for Business Leaders

Posted by Beverly Crandon on 9/23/10 • Categorized as Business,Social Media

As social media and social networks show no end to their growth and adoption rates (my 70 year old mother just joined Facebook two weeks ago), we consistently preach the need for businesses to be aware and welcoming of the social web, and to also educate their employees on what the companies focus is, on social networks.  Through social media communication and education, employees with high profile positions, or those just mentioning the organization or brand, will communicate and represent you publicly, as a unit.  Furthermore, if you haven’t yet created your social media blueprint for employees, you will be amiss to know that you are falling behind the WWE.  Yes,  you read right, the World Wrestling Entertainment group.

We’ve just learned that the WWE has issued its own set of social media guidelines for its wrestling talent, in hopes to protect the organization and its fighters reputation and personal brand.  Now the WWE may be going too far with their rules as they’ve stated something along the lines of “All talent must have their personal social networking account screened by WWE before being approved for use”.  As business owners and leaders, you do not want to institute guidelines that cause a backlog because you have to read all intended public messages – that defeats the purpose of social media.  However, the WWE is reacting to recent posts on Twitter and videos published by Matt Hardy, one of their fighters (if interested – Matt Hardy story here and the video that upset the WWE here).  So, given the WWE’s steps to embrace, kind of, social media, we thought we would help those of you who haven’t created your blueprint, by getting you started with a few tips.

Tips for business leaders, when creating social media rules of engagement for employees

Determine Your Social Edge: your guidelines should promote the messages you would like your employees to convey to the public about your brand, service, product or industry know how.  It is not enough to list the “what you cannot do’s”, but you must also list the “how you can help us engage socially” items.  The latter will better promote and enhance your organization.

Update Employees On Your Social Edge: your driving message, or some of them anyway if product related, should change and staff should be kept current on what messages you are hoping to relay, given a new product or launch.

Transparency: ensure employees know that if mentioning the brand or company that they should also make known their status or relationship with the company.  The last thing you want is for the social sphere to think you’ve staged users to give your brand praise or a leg up.

Trust Your Employees: you hired them for a reason.  Trust that they would exercise good judgement with the release of your guidelines.  You can never have enough social noise on the Web.  The higher the number of employees representing your brand or service, positively on the Web, the better for you in trying to gain social followers, who hopefully will syndicate your messages.

Reporting Is Your Friend: it is not enough to guide employees in what they can say about your brand, you must also analyse what is being said by the public about your brand.  Recognize where social conversations with customers or potential customers and brand advocates may happen and use these findings when updating Your Social Edge.

Consult Legal: before publishing your guidelines, run them by your legal department, just in case, but be strong in educating them, if needed, on the effectiveness of the social web, if used appropriately.  Guide them in understanding the rules of social engagement.

AOL Drops Bebo to Focus on Patch (?)

Posted by Beverly Crandon on 4/06/10 • Categorized as Online Classifieds, Online Journalism, Social Media

There has been talk that AOL is planning on dropping Bebo, their social networking site, claiming that in the competitive world of social media, they’ve found it difficult to create a competitive and financially viable product out of Bebo.  I speculate on how much of that is really true and if their decision has anything to do with their recent and well embraced Patch.org initiative (a hyper-local online news, events, directory and classifieds site where content is contributed by the community) and their wanting to apply more energies there.  Already, Patch has progressed into an interesting business, but we’re still not convinced that it has a strong enough ’sustainability’ quality.

Whether the decision to drop Bebo is a strategic one or the right one, it seems difficult to understand the motivations, given the numbers posted about the social site.

Does the strategy change to be a geographic one, gender or age related…

If the focus for AOL truly lies in the future of Patch.org, there could be worries impending for newspaper publishers. For quite some time it’s been that suburban newspapers were maintaining some of their market share, as they were able to give advertisers a voice in a hyper-local forum found nowhere else, both online and in print.  If serious thought is put behind Patch.org and partnerships are formed to bolster key content areas of the site, things could get even more challenging for publishers.  One such natural partnership would be a play with Craigslist.  If you think about it, both properties apply a ‘for the people’ mentality and both have what the other doesn’t and both have dropped hints to wanting content sets that the other excels at.

Related information:

• Google once owned 5% of AOL and sold it at a loss to Time Warner in 2009
• Time Warner broke off the AOL extension of their business in 2009, after repeat and reported revenue losses
• AOL spent $850 million to buy Bebo in 2008