November 29, 2006
An interview with Peter Vogt
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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Vogt from eBay about internal communications.
Peter is the Director of Internal Communications for eBay and is responsible for communicating with eBay’s 11,000+ employees, personally running a team of 16 communicators worldwide. eBay stole him from Microsoft, where he was the Head of Internal Communications worldwide.
eBay has three companies: eBay itself, PayPal, and its most recent acquisition, Skype.
A PR graduate, Peter has enjoyed 20 years as a ‘Communicator’ and along the way gained a phenomenal amount of insight and knowledge into employee communications — I cannot recommend this interview highly enough if you want to get an insight into the challenges and successes of a highly successful communicator.
Some of Peter’s great comments include:
“You should only work for companies you are passionate about”
“Mark my words: within 5 years Skype will be the leading company within the eBay group”
“Engagement has evolved, but we haven’t evolved with it”
“When your cheese moves, move with your cheese” (in reference to the phenomenal best-seller Who Moved My Cheese)
“Are you wedded to your career as a communicator, or are you wedded to the company? In my experience rarely do the two actually ’sync’ up”
“This [communications] can be an extremely exciting industry to pursue — I have found that internal communications has the ability to really make a difference in many ways, and when done well it can be the true ‘leader’ and ‘lead’ the change. I encourage anyone in this industry to think of new ways of engagement and think of themselves not as simply writers, or not as simply conduits, but actually people who can be catalysts in and of themselves”
Download the interview (21mb; 47 minutes), or subscribe to the CommsCafe rss feed to have all of the interviews delivered to your computer or mp3 player.
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December 2nd, 2006 at 2:48 pm
[...] I listened to a great interview with Peter Vogt from eBay about internal communications hosted by the (in)famous Lee Hopkins pushed through the Comms Cafe podcast recently. I know that Lee is huge on internal communications and I appreciate his passion for proper communications. The interview was excellent, Peter having some great things to say about his experiences with Microsoft and eBay. Fascinating stuff. You should all check it out. [...]
January 5th, 2007 at 6:52 am
[...] Peter Vogt(mp3) [more details] [...]
January 5th, 2007 at 7:10 am
[...] Peter Vogt(mp3) [more details] [...]