eBay

In February 2008, we teamed up with Richard Brewer-Hay, eBay’s editor-in-chief and social media director, to begin developing “eBay Ink,” the company’s first corporate blog.

Our Platform Services team worked with Richard and the Voce Client Services team to analyze the best platforms available to support the content strategy for eBay Ink. Additionally, we began developing a strategy to best support the variety of media types to be used for eBay Ink which included a mix from audio, video, photography and artwork.

For this project, we used WordPress as our primary publishing platform along with several ancillary services to help augment and extend the content strategy, including Flickr, Viddler, Yahoo! Pipes, Delicious and Twitter. Responses from Richard were key in this project, so the ability to highlight his communication with the community was a must. We integrated our custom plugin to highlight author comments, but also allow author comments to be inserted directly into the thread where the response is needed to allow a more natural flow of discussion in the blog.

Our team’s expertise regarding the deployment and subsequent hosting of WordPress allowed this project to come online in a short timeline. Our team continues to help monitor overall health of the blog and hosting environment, offering support and updates whenever necessary.

We implemented a unique news page called “eBay News” which allowed the PR team to create ad hoc newsrooms within eBay Ink for big company announcements like earnings, acquisitions and important corporate events.

In April of 2008, on the heels of a Fortune story profiling Richard, we successfully launched eBay Ink. We have since continued to help the eBay team manage the health and growth of eBay Ink including most recently, the build out of a larger eBay (corporate) social media strategy.

Additional Projects

We’ve had the opportunity to work on several peripheral social media projects with eBay, including the development of”eBay Insider,” a consumer blog for eBay’s Style Squad, as well as a microsite development project and a custom newsroom for the 2008 holiday shopping season.

Services Used

+ User Interface Planning, including wireframes, content structures, and functional specs
+ Interface Design, including home page, post pages, archives, news release areas
+ WordPress Platform Development including custom themes and plugins
+ Hosting and platform support, including server health monitoring, plugin updates and platform updates.