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Everyone who attends eBay Live knows the madness that ensues around the collectible eBay and vendor pins. Whenever that music starts you get to see the mob descend upon and dismember eBay employees in order to ensure they don’t miss getting a pin. It’s fun, crazy, and thoroughly addicting!

So, seeing the fun everyone was having, I too decided to get into the game. Like most things I do, I decided if I was going to do this, I needed to do it right. Using my connections through the eBay developers community, eBay employees and smooth talking to eBay Live attendees, I was able to gather a FULL set. I also was able to get all 3 lanyards: attendee, eBay developer, and eBay employee (try and find that collection on eBay!)

Except…

Yep, you know it’s coming. I couldn’t get that most elusive of pins – the sparkly shiny, only-1000-were-made, highly-prized one. The Rare Rhinestone Pin of eBay Live Greatness! (that’s actually not the official name). So, In order to complete this set, I’m going to have to buy it on eBay.

There’s good news in here though. When our new eBay sellers product is launched, List’d, I’ll be listing the full set on eBay for some lucky soul to win!

Keep checking back for when that is going to happen, or you can sign up for our email in the right margin of this page to get updated via email.

Bill Cobb, President of eBay North America, has a couple things to say about the following:

• eBay’s size (200 million!)
• Skype integration
• PayPal
• eBay blogs
• eBay wiki
• New Trust & Safety Policy
• Crack down on Excessive Shipping
• Cross-Border Trade – A Privilege, Not a Right
• Grand Opening for eBay Express

You can read the full report here.

Well, we’re on the last day of eBay Live! 2006. As everyone knows, this is the date that you run around to all the booths and try and scoop up their hand-out loot. We’ve been lucky with having the two hottest commodities:

• The best eBay pins
• A polaroid of you with Las Vegas’ hottest showgirls.
• Yoyo “Cush” balls (fun for the kids!)

We’ve only got 100 of our gold collectible pins left. If you come by today and tell me the secret word I’ll give you one.

Secret Word: “Showgirls!”

Hope you come by and see us at Booth 326.

Here are some more pictures – thanks for coming by eBaby!

    
(click for larger images)

This morning I’m enjoying a very good seminar at eBay Live by Andy Sernovitz of Gaspedal.net, where he is discussing “The eBay Entrepreneur: The Secret Sauce for Selling Stuff”. What I’m really enjoying about this presentation is that Andy is talking a lot about blogs (like this one!), social networking among people on blogs, message boards and chat, and about finding inexpensive ways to market yourself online.

Here are some recaps from the presentation:

Acronym of the day “GREASE”:

• Guerilla promotion
• Reel them in
• Encourage trust
• Amaze your buyers
• Sign them up to help
• Entrepreneurial Energy

Since the Guerilla marketing piece was my favorite, here are the highlights of that section. All very good advice!

eBay is a crowded space, you can’t wait for people to find you – go out and get them
A million ways to do it
– Participate in the online conversation (blogs, message boards, chat rooms)
– Mention your auctions
– Respect the network/channel that you’re in – DON’T blatantly “sell” your stuff.

Word of Mouth marketing (WOM)
– Word of mouth is cheap
– Word of mouth favors the little guy
– Be remarkable (references Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow”

Easy Publicity Stunts
- Auction to raise money for charity
- Link to related products
- Gives people something to write about
- Gives someone a reason to link back to you
- Sell something WEIRD (ex: Jones Soda: Sells the worlds most awful flavors of soda)

Find a Partner who doesn’t compete with you and has a reason to link to you
- Who will link to your listings?
- Who benefits your successes?
- Find a NON-Competing ally
- How to motivate them:
- Give them a commission
- Put their promo in your box
- Put a sample of their product in your box
(ex: Tieyak could partner with fishing lodges)

Here’s hoping that Andy puts the rest of the slides up on the web somewhere.

One of the big messages that eBay has been pushing at this year’s eBay Live is “The Power of 3″. The three being:

1. eBay.com – eCommerce
2. Skype – Communication
3. Paypal – Payment

Truthfully, these are three of the best applications in their class. Below is Meg Whitman talking about it at eBay Live tonight:

(Please forgive the quality)

Come by and see us in Booth 326

We’ve been having a ton of fun today for the first day of eBay Live. It’s been great meeting many of our customers who use MarketPlacePro, as well as people who we hope will try our products one day. We’ve also been telling people about List’d, our newest product that will be out in 2-3 weeks (signup for email updates on the right).

We did luck on to one of the biggest attractions to any booth at eBay Live… that being our fabulous show girls. You can come to our booth and get a Polaroid shot of you with the twins. It’s really been a lot of fun, and everyone’s been enjoying it.

Here are a couple of shots from today. Thanks everyone!