LiveWorld, the company that eBay outsource the community discussion boards to, has appointed two new directors:
Barry Weinman founded the venture capital company Allegis, which helped over 70 private companies go public. He describes LiveWorld as a “pioneer and leader in social networking”. Bill Cleary is experienced in growing technology-based marketing agencies and founded the CKS Group responsible for launching the likes of Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon.com and Disney.
Social networking is the “cornerstone of relationship marketing for the 21st century” according to Cleary. Certainly devotees of the eBay discussion boards will be no stranger to just how many hours it’s possible to while away chatting about eBay and of course in part carrying out eBay support free of charge.
LiveWorld have a unique business proposition in creating bolt on online communities for companies. As well as eBay the work with AOL, Expedia HSBC, Kodak, QVC and many other leading companies.
6 Responses
they create an atmosphere of mistrust and encourage
cliques and reporting as a sport,
reasonable comments are often mis reported it seems warnings are given just about automatically this has the effect of
lobotomising balanced discussion
Hmmmm Liveworld.
It is interesting that whilst the technological world has evolved the eBay boards are still very 1999. In part, for once there is the maxim of it it ‘aint broke, don’t fix it but you can’t help that a few cosmetic touches here and there would help. I’d still hold back on the options you allow users (polls for example would be dangerous) but given the vast, vast numbers of people who spend their time on these boards it would be great to see some greater functionality.
As an example I recall with horror what a nightmare it was to change any of the marketing spaces down the right hand side. That is prime real estate yet the graphics and the links in there are so so old.
Pity.
“I recall with horror what a nightmare it was to change any of the marketing spaces”
Is that why “PowerSeller of the month” has turned out to be “PowerSeller of the half year”? 😛
Partly Chris, partly. I submitted one last article just before I left but sadly no one has update the pages. Shame.
Chris, that’s probably because the person in charge of PSOTM abandoned ship, and is irreplaceable 😀
Liveworld….boy I remember those guys 😮
I used to get emails from them everyday, always used to think it was spam, by the time I finally opened one it was the final final warning. 😆