Not because I think its a better service, or anything.  In the end, I think that Craigslist just has too much inertia, but, I suppose if anyone has the clout and mainstream awareness — and the corporate willingness to spend on advertising and marketing to make it a fair go of it, I think it would be eBay.

But that’s besides the point.

The reason why my vote is with eBay is because I would like nothing better than to see Jim Buckmaster and Craig Newmark challenged on their hippie ethos at Craigslist.  You know — the “we’re not in the business of maximizing revenues” approach to things?  The “People should go where they get the best service — even if its not us” tack on things?

All fine and good.

And easy when you’re the biggest kid on the block, whose very size makes it all but impossible for any real competitors to sink their teeth into you.

But now that eBay has put on the gloves?  I’m real interested now, because this has the real makings of a real fight.  Real competition.  Maybe forcing Craigslist to do some real innovating, or re-think their ideals.

That is to say, perhaps forcing them to answer an unanswered question many people are thinking: what *would* a company do, which has a “delightful communist” at the helm, which has stated that things like “advertising” and “marketing” and other capitalistic practices are antithetical to its values — if it were ever given serious competition?   What would happen if its market share dropped 10%?

… 20%?

… or how about 40%?

Would this cause Craig Newmark to sweat?  Would they start doing something about it?  Or would they happily put a sign up linking to Kijiji because — clearly — *some* people *do* find that they’re better at being Craigslist than Craiglist?

Call me cynical, but I’m a little bit skeptical of the whole Craigslist message.  Its fine and convenient to have when you have no real competition.  But when push comes to shove, will they still uphold these values?

More on building a community with Lionel Menchacha, Will Pate, and Jordan Banks:

• “How do you manage that passion?”
  • WP: When I started at Flock, pick your title — well, I chose “Community Ambassador” because there were groups that weren’t happy with each other.  Its tough to manage but its important to create a safe environment
  • JB: Being passionately objective is important on all sides
  • LM: At Dell we don’t have the same issues, but we do have to deal with negativity.  We launched the blog because we have issues with customer support — and we’ve been going the wrong way for a while.  We had to deal with pent up negativity right out of the gate.  We had to know the reality we were up against — the other issue was what is the strategy … we’re going to blog about the problems but the ongoing process of improvement.  And apologizing for things that messed up.  And that’s scary for most corporations — just saying sorry.  But that what makes the company human — and it resonates with the company.
• “When you look at the business decisions EBay has made, how do you deal with satisfying business results at the expense of the community?”
  • JB: One of the tough thing about EBay is that we’re the biggest marketplace and we have a responsibility to tweak to create a fair market — because its not perfect.  We talk to lots of suppliers and buyers about how to create a fair equilibrium on all sides.  Not everyone likes the decisions, but at least we’re talking to people about pricing reductions or additions.
• “Do you believe there will be a time for a syndicated reputation service?”
  • JB: Absolutely.  Its shocking that you can’t carry your reputation with you.  Is it up to augment that?  Maybe.  But its no different than passwords.   One day we’ll walk around with a single password — and the same thing will occur with reputations.
• “Favourite or Worst Example of community impact”
  • JB: We have an active member in Montreal.  And she came upon 6 kittens that needed a home.  Someone who was a virtual friend wanted these kittens.  Members on EBay from Montreal to  New Brunswick managed to bring kittens from Montreal to New Brunswick.
  • WP: There was a kid in Florida, but he’s sick.  He probably won’t make it to 20 or 30.  He’s always sending me long emails.  But he says that the only thing that matters is that when you’re online you listen to me.  I may not live to tell my story — but come on, what tops that?
  • LM: We launched Ideastorm in February 16.  On that first day someone submitted an idea about Dell shipping with Linux which stayed the top idea for months.  What we did from there is get more information from the community.  I blogged about the survey, and in 9 days of the survey going out we had 100k respondents.  From the time we had the survey results, from the time we got that information there was 60 days to shipping out Ubuntu on Dell.  We saw a lot of interest in the US and around the world — and that’s the next thing we’re looking out for.
• “What if Michael Dell didn’t care?  Why should anyone do it?  How have you illustrated the value of building community?”
  • LM: The reality is that we still launched many of these things quickly.  We did it 4 weeks after the request for blogging came.  There were not many people who realized what we were doing when we did it.  We did encounter resistance within the company — for lots of reasons.  We’re airing dirty laundry and so on.  We were fortunate because we were launching it one way or another.  And it was a gradual process where I can show what happens when we talk about negative topics.  But what we can show is that people are happy we’re sharing information.  That we’re talking about it and the nature of having conversation carries dividends.  How do you measure it?  That’s a tough things.  But Ideastorm its great.  Its a closed loop system where we can show people how we’re getting to it.
• “How Do you illustrate to people who just don’t get it?”
  • JB: Discussions and community forums were the proxy for our initial measurements.  And what we’ve found is that people who do participate is that you’re 2-3x more valuable on the buy OR sell side.  Or, that the churn rate is 1/3 the normal user.  Its a powerful equation to demonstrate the power of community.
  • WP: Saves support, increases pageviews — its all available.  Just google “community ROI”.
• “How about Microsoft?”
  • RM: Its exactly the same — blogs, user groups — its the same.
• “Sellers can withhold feedback until they get a positive feedback — that’s changed.  Buyers are not really represented well.  What do you do to get to your real users?  Are folks that are active really representative?  Are they the norm?”
  • JB: Yeah, it drives me crazy when the feedback isn’t sent back until the transaction is completed.  But the sellers are different.  WE have a new system though that allows buyers  to give a more  colorful and full description of the seller.
• On building a community
  • WP: Community compliments all the other stuff you do — but the more you do the more it benefits you.
• On multi-lingual community
  • WP: Its a big challenge — its hard enough in one language. I am not sure if I have the answer to that problem
  • LM: From a Dell perspective, the question is how we spin into other languages.  A few months ago we released a Chinese version.  And we’ve recently released a Spanish version.  Look at all the languages in Europe — it creates a lot more departments and a lot more resources, there are no easy answers.
  • JB: There’s not a lot of play between people of different cultures and languages — its a hard thing to get it to work.
• How do you deal with community to drive things in a way that you never expected?
  • LM: The onus is on us to say that if something isn’t feasible to say why.  The worst thing is to have an idea that rises to the top and not say anything about it.  Before we launched the blog, the initiative came from Michael — to monitor the blogosphere, and match bloggers who have issues with appropriate support people.  We knew there was a lot of negativity out there.  Its that kind of homework pays off — ou can’t just jump in without knowing what’s going on.
  • JB: If we didn’t let the community decide where to take us we’d be a shadow of what we are today.  Example: eBay Motors was launched at the behest of the community.
• On Fraud:
  • JB: Our community has a vested interest to make sure things work right.  They’re on the look out to make sure about what does goes right and we’re lucky we have the size to make things go right.
• On When THings Go Bad:
  • JB: We choose to be part of the discussion.  As long as you’re transparent and fall up with issues its hard to continue to be angry.  And shame on us for being angry.
  • WP: You can kill people with being kind and transparent.
  • LM: We had a lot of negativity in the beginning and that has to be the strategy.  I’ve looked at things from the customer point of view — and they’re frustrated.  Let them vent.  Air it out.  Then start the conversation.  Reaching out diffuses the anger to solve problems.
  • WP: If you can turn negative people around they will be your most passionate supporters.  If they didn’t care they wouldn’t hang around.

Mark Relph talks to Will Pate, Jordan Banks, and Lionel Menchacha about How To Build a Community

• “Community means different things to different people — what does community to you or organization?”
  • LM: Communities can be formed around similar interests or common goals.  We look at things in terms of our customer base.  We use things like blogs ad ideastorm to build that sense of community — and give people a reason to work with and interact with Dell.
  • WP: Communities mean I can go to a conference and talk to people and do so without a badge for most of it! (laughter).  Community is those who engage with you. RE: CommandN –what it means is stories that are fed to me and Amber every day and commenting and evangelizing for us.  We all have day jobs, so we rely on our fans to do that for us.
  • JB: Community means people who have my back.  Who have my interests in mind — who want good things for me and are willing to make it happen.  Its not a very different online than off.  We think of community as people with like passions and desires who get together.  We never lose sight of who our bosses are, and they are people who use the site.
• “What about awesomeness?”
  • WP: People are attracted to things that are awesome — people will get passionate about it and get attracted to it.  That’s my theory.
• “What has been the implications does community have for your business?”
  • LM: Before we launched our community initiatives, our focus was on launching things and focusing things on how great Dell was.  It was a change where we became more customer centric — the blog and ideastorm is what its all about.  Ideastorm was launched 4 months ago, and its the combination of Digg and a messageboard.  Anyone can login and submit an idea about how we can make things better.  The voting helps decide which ideas are popular.  If we launched this tool it wasn’t going to work, and that’s why action is important.
• “Has there been an internal fight around transparency?”
  • LM: At Dell its not something we had.  Michael Dell himself has been passionate about it, and he was behind launching Ideastorm right away.  Different heads of businesses need to be aware of what’s coming through to Ideastorm and they are.
• “What about taking feedbacking and using it?”
  • JB: Its hard to hide on the Internet.  The biggest successes involve listening to the community.  The challenge involves trying to listen to disparate opinions.  The best thing to do is to acknowledge that they’ve been heard, if not acted upon, and the reasons behind it.  We fail probably more than we succeed — but at least we try and that’s important.
• “How do you *do* it?”
  • WP: A lot of companies go in and try and expect something magical to grow; figure out where your passionate users are.  They might be on blogs, facebook, or wherever.  Its important to listen to what the rules of engagement and rules of the game — listen first.  Then ask questions.
• “Is it important to own these things?”
  • WP: Its always good to have someone pushing it — like an evangelist.  Community success is probably defined about what people internally say as well.  You don’t have to be perfect — but you do have to be honest.
  • JB: At the heart of the community is passion.  And its easy to figure out what those favourites are.  Its easy to think of community as a vertical function — we tried to do that and we weren’t good with that.  Rather than having community as a vertical silent function, we now run it horizontally along the entire company, through different departments.