Remaining Attendee Questions from Recent eBay Webinar

To follow up on our recent webinar with Ramin Mobasseri of eBay, here are his answers to the remaining questions we were not able to get to during the webinar Q&A session. If you missed it, click here to check out this on-demand webinar!

Q: How has ESN affected the productivity of eBay’s workforce? Has time dedicated to ESN decreased time dedicated to actual work? Have you seen an increase in employee engagement and retention since the solution was implemented?

Ramin: It is too early to determine that but we do have our benchmarks and metrics through the Employee Pulse Survey. Next year we will hopefully do a comparison. There are, of course, other quantitative ways to do this, such as measuring the number of blogs, profile changes, microblog, #tags, etc. The key is to correlate such information to key areas like user adoption, increased productivity, and decreasing attrition rates for instance.

Q: Are you applying standards to community design? Do you enforce/promote standardization?

Ramin: Yes, we have branded the communities the same as the Hub with designated master pages and styles sheets.

Q: How many dedicated resources took part in your project?

Ramin: Seven.

Has NewsGator complicated your migration to SharePoint 2010? Do you see it as a complication going forward?

Ramin: Not at all. We upgraded first and then applied NewsGator to our environment. But remember, we also had NewsGator in our DEV, QA, Sandbox, and Staging environments. I think we practiced enough to know if something was going to go wrong. We also carried out an extensive performance and load test before and after, and all the indications were that NewsGater had not affected the environment negatively.

Q: How has ESN impacted the utilization of email?

Ramin: It's too early to tell.

Q: Where in the organization was this initiative sponsored?

Ramin: Global Corporate Technology and Operational Excellence

Q: If you could offer just three words of advice to other companies just starting to roll out enterprise social computing what would they be?

Ramin: I can give you three phrases instead: start small, test & learn, and focus on user adoption.

Q: Can you provide a few examples of how you encouraged executive sponsorship and user adoption?

Ramin: Executives want to and need to get closer to their groups, and sometimes, simple newsletters are not enough. So suggest building a CIO, CTO, and/or CFO Corner where people can connect to their leaders directly. They can share and learn from all the suggestions and questions they receive.

Use real-life scenarios, for example, a day in the life of a Project Manager, or a day in the life of the Learning & Development Team, HR, Legal, etc.

Also, apply the Find an Expert scenario within various functional groups. Sometimes finding an expert is an extremely costly initiative. So why not find those experts within your own company.

Use the benefits of social to lower costs by reducing travel and emails. Imagine when someone goes on vacation and when they come back, they will need to go through so many emails; however, if there was a community for them, they could simply browse through the community and find out what has been going on.