Social media engages employees at eBay

How blogs, webcasts and a companywide film festival helped the Internet giant energize employees

For an Internet company that thrives on new technologies that allow users to communicate and do business with each other, eBay was having trouble getting messages across to its own employees.

In a 2005 survey of employees, eBay’s internal communications team found that 41 percent of staffers felt they were not kept well-informed about the issues that mattered to them most—a stat David Knight, vice president of internal communications for eBay, set out to change.

“We have 14,500 employees with an average age of 30 [years old],” Knight says. “All of them are very tech savvy and hungry for information across all mediums, so we capitalized on that.”

Engaging the tech-savvy employee

Knight and his team launched Web radio programming designed to keep employees in the loop on everything from financial news to hot topics around the company. They air hour-long live webcasts (always filmed in front of a live audience) with a panel of managers or top executives, where much of the time is spent in question-and-answer sessions with employees.