A vous de jouer, eBay Francophones! Town Hall Celebrates Newest eBay Site
Posted by Ninad on October 30, 2006 at 07:29 PM in General | Permalink
Last week's Town Hall opened with a French greeting from Griff, back again as emcee. He awarded himself a new title - Destroyer of the French Language - to go with his long string of other achievements (such as Dean of eBay Education, Host of eBay Radio, and Author of The Official eBay Bible). The French greeting was a shoutout (perhaps homage is the mot juste) to eBay Canada's newly launched French site.
To celebrate the occasion, Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America, even showed up at the Town Hall wearing a Canadian hockey jersey. The other panelists included Matt Halprin, VP, eBay Global Trust and Safety Policy, Jim Ambach, Senior Director, Product Management, and Leigh Goldstein, Director, Shipping.
Our latest Voices of the Community group, Voices 39, was also in San Jose, and participated in the proceedings.
Before moving on to answer questions from members (both live and sent in beforehand), Bill spent a few minutes talking of Community Counts, an exciting promo we're launching soon, as well as the new "it" commercials that have been airing on TV.
Community Counts – I love the deliberate play on words – is an exciting promo we're launching on November 1st. Bill explained how we're inviting our Community (which is what makes eBay so special) to stand up and be "counted." For three weeks starting November 1st, we'll be awarding points to people for their eBay activity, whether it's buying, selling, participating in the Community Forums, or charitable buying and selling activity through eBay Giving Works. After the promotion ends on November 21, the local community with the most points will be named the #1 eBay Community in America for 2006. A nonprofit charity in their ZIP code will receive a $10,000 donation from eBay, Inc. And eBay will host a big party in their town to celebrate, with Bill Cobb and Griff attending.
Later that day, Gary Briggs, our Chief Marketing Officer, posted more details about Community Counts on the Announcements Board: "We'll track activity on the site and sort it by ZIP code – so every community in America will have the equal opportunity to join in with their neighbors and compete in 'Community Counts'," he wrote.
Bill also talked about the six new ads that make up the latest It campaign ("Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay"). They've been airing since Game 1 of the World Series. Bill explained that these ads are part of an overall integrated campaign that eBay’s going to roll out in the next few weeks. By the end of the year, these ads are expected to reach 85% of their target audience a whopping 13 times each! That should be good news for our sellers gearing up for the holiday season.
And then they moved on to the questions. Members had sent in over 2800
questions for this Town Hall. Obviously the team couldn't answer all of
them in the one hour they had, but I thought that the questions that
were filtered through were by no means "rah rah eBay" - some were quite
controversial, even prickly. You can get a good indication from the
very first one - which I thought was a doozy, even though Griff said it
was on a high note: "The
new Sell Your Item form stinks. Leave it alone. Do something else to
earn your salary and leave the listing tools alone. I think that
probably most of the people revamping have not a clue as to what we
have to go through when you try to change things that don’t need
changing… at least give us the option to use the old one forever if we
want to…"
To hear Jim Ambach's answer to this question, and the panelists' responses to other questions on a wide range of topics, such as allowing Airmail Letter Post as a shipping option when purchasing and printing international labels through PayPal, "leaving the site alone" during the holiday season, clarifications on the Excessive Shipping Policy, and many more, listen to the Town Hall audio archive. You may also want to keep this thread, containing Ryan's excellent pictures of the Town Hall, open in another browser window, to get a better visual sense of the event (see if you can spot me lurking in the background in some of the pictures). We'll also have the transcript of the Town Hall ready for you to read on the Town Hall Archives page, in the next few days.
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