EBay convinced thousands of employees to participate in its social network by offering free X-boxes

SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA — If you want to build a strong social network inside your company, you need approval from top management, great development tools, and integration with popular websites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. But that’s not all. You also need about $5,000 worth of Xboxes and Starbucks gift cards, so you can bribe your employees to actually use the thing.

Alright, so maybe some companies are building their own social networks without resorting to bribery, but eBay’s Ramin Mobasseri found that it helped.

Mobasseri — an enterprise portals solutions manager at the online auction house — recently built the social network called Hub inside eBay’s corporate intranet. But staffers were slow to fill out their profile information on the service. So he bribed them.

After kicking off a “Hubgrade” contest that gave people a chance to win gift cards or — the grand prize — an Xbox, the total number of profiles skyrocketed from 700 to about 6,000, he said, speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference here in San Jose Tuesday.

Built on top of Sharepoint 2010 and NewsGator, the Hub is pretty cool. It lets eBay employees build communities, search for information, and even post status updates to the corporate network, LinkedIn and Twitter simultaneously.

But Mobasseri needed full employees profiles on the network so that people could learn about each other and connect.

Having thousands of profiles really kick started the project, Mobasseri said. “We ran an exercise for three months and in those three months we encouraged those people to enrich their user profiles,” he said. “We offered them lots of goodies, almost bribed everyone, to do their profiles.”

“You have to.”

(Photo courtesy Flickr/Rodrigo Denúbila)