Chatting it up with Ebay

The intended audience of the Ebay Chatter blog is people who are buyers/sellers on ebay or people who are interested in finding out the latest hot items on Ebay and new features of the site. Unlike Walmart, the employees of Ebay are focusing more on the products and posting news items that cater to specific groups. For example, one ebay employee posted about items related to Barry Bonds for avid baseball fans. Another post was related to Fantasy Football, a topic very popular at this time of the year. The goal of the blog is to provide the latest news on ebay products and community events and they are doing it well.

The site allows, encourages, and receives comments very well. There is a separate discussion board where people can comments on posts or start new topics. Rather than replying on the board, the employees will often comment on the chatter website. Ebay also has a space for people to create their own blog, many which are about their experiences on the site or items they are looking to sell.

The average entries are approximately four paragraphs long, depending on the topic of the post. Entries on the site usually consist of text and photo of the blogger. Many of the posts also include videos (imbedded from YouTube) and other images to support the content of the post. The posts are reader-friendly providing brief detailed information about their current events.

The blog presents an image of community and it shows that the employees are interested in providing assistance to their users to ensure they have positive experiences on Ebay. The team responsible for posting to the blog is part of Community Development at Ebay and they are friendly and dedicated to interacting with members of the community. The postings about member spotlights are sincere and show they care about the people who buy and sell items on their site. Before reading this blog, I thought that Ebay was devoted to the booming business of e-commerce, barely doing dealings with the world offline. Overall, Ebay does a good job of presenting themselves online and putting a face to their name.