Over the weekend I was lucky enough to attend eBay On Location, a road show the online auction and shopping website organises in key cities.
It's been fashionable to be cynical about eBay, about how it morphed from an entrepreneurial marketplace to a profit-driven, faceless conglomerate that favours hard-nosed volume sellers.
The event overturned these perceptions. It was big enough so that every detail was seen to, but the way sessions were designed and delivered, and the way delegates were encouraged to network, was very community-orientated. Following are the actions that made this contradiction possible:
Start the networking before the welcome reception. Days before the conference, I was invited to two coffee chats with eBay managers who wanted to find out how I felt about the company's services and offerings. These were done in groups, so I was able to meet fellow sellers in addition to eBay staff.
Most conferences kick off networking with a welcome reception. Not a bad idea but for big events it can still feel like a cattle call. The group coffee chats were intimate and made delegates feel they knew the staff even before the conference began.
The result? Friendly hellos in the hallways of the hotel that were genuine, not forced, and better perceptions of a company often seen as controlling and evil. Props to eBay for taking the time and trouble to start relationship-building before they were engulfed by running the event itself.
Empower delegates to stand out. Hands up if you hate the company t-shirt and the license-plate sized badge you are doomed to wear over three days. eBay had a really neat solution: It offered delegates an assortment of adhesive-backed ribbons that they could use to customise their badges and encourage networking. My own badge is below.
All I had to do was look for similar ribbons and strike up a conversation. And for the first time, I wasn't looking for any excuse to bin the badge.
Knock their socks off by making one ordinary detail extraordinary. This was a boxed lunch, no frills, one-day only conference. Yet eBay kitted out the ballroom with tiered U-shaped seating so everyone got a talk-show feel and view of the stage; white Barcelona chairs in strategically placed conversation lounge areas; branded accents in the most unexpected areas, the most talked-about being the white carpet that lined one of the seating tiers.
White carpets? Who does white carpets apart from Elton John? Well eBay does, and it was an unexpectedly luxe detail that was burnt forever in the delegates' memories.
Understand that the people make or break the event. Every staffer I encountered was polished, stylish and articulate. eBay's bearded and baseball-capped Griff whom I met at my coffee chat not only welcomed the delegates in the morning, he also starred in a video about easy shipping online. A technical glitch during one session had the IT guy talking about his progress fixing it, on mic, to the speaker in a spontaneous conversation reminiscent of office banter. One eBay employee live-tweeting the conference proudly said that they were all wearing organic cotton company t-shirts.
eBay online is a huge, noisy, anonymous marketplace. These glimpses hinted at a workplace that, contrary to what we'd been moaning about, seemed to be populated by real, likable people. Who -- shock, horror -- were proud of their own company swag.
Was the camaraderie real or staged? Are the staff really like this back in San Jose? Who knows? All I knew was that despite my jadedness, my impressions of eBay changed. So did the other delegates who, armed with complaints about the unfairness of detailed seller ratings, inaccurate shipping calculators and other injustices to sellers, were won over by the end of the conference.
Walter Landor once said that "products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind." Whoever helmed eBay On Location knowingly or unknowingly altered a city's mental picture of a brand for the better -- and it took a conference, not a multi-million dollar campaign, to make it happen.
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