The first social auction - auctions meet twitter, facebook and blogging

I was chatting with some entrepreneurs lately that are active in the social space and we got to brainstorming some concepts about the intersection of ecommerce and social media.

It occured to me that auctions+twitter+social are a great possible marriage.  Think back to when auctions were fun on eBay.  You could watch what others were bidding on, things started at low prices and had bid-up, out-bid notifications mattered and most importantly you got some great deals.  You also didn't have to worry about spam, phishing, etc.

Now imagine you could get all of that good old auction excitement back, but through the twitter platform.  You would be alerted of new items with tweets and then follow any outbids.  you could also see what other twitter'ers were bidding on and decide if you want to lurk or jump into the fray.

This was rolling around in the back of my brain and then I remembered an article where someone had done a quick and dirty auction on craigslist using google forms+spreadsheet.

Thus I thought it would be fun to test this concept out in a very rudimentary way using those basic free tools. So here is what I believe to be the first social auction!

The world's first social auction - running for 3 days -ends at noon on 5/9 ET

Picture: (click for larger version)

Description:

Up for social-auction starting at $1 with $.50 increments is this adorable Webkinz Koala bear.  It has been in a smoke free home since purchased about a year ago and is in mint condition.    The webkinz-world code is intact and has never been activated.  This one of the larger webkinz, not the inferior 'lil kinz.

Shipping+handling:

I'll do free shipping on this puppy, er.. koala

How to bid:

You can check the current bid at this link.  http://snipr.com/hhedj

You can submit a bid at this link.  http://snipr.com/hhed2

How to pay:

Let's do paypal!  I'll send you a manual request for money after the auction ends.

How to help the experiment:

In the interest of helping with the experiment if you could use the hashtag #socialauction and help get the word out on your network that would be great:

• Twitter - retweeet - e.g. "RT @scotwingo - first social auction is here - http://snipr.com/socialauction - webkinz panda #socialauction"
• Facebook - change your status for a second to be this: "First social auction - learn more here: http://snipr.com/socialauction. Or you can post a link (go to facebook homepage and in the upper left you'll see a 'links' area - this is the link to post: 
• myspace, plaxo, linkedin, etc. - You can change your status or post a link that gets populated to friends - the link should be http://snipr.com/socialauction.

I'll report back with the results in 3 days on how many folks this reaches and of course how the auction concludes.  I won't be accepting bids post noon on 5/9 so bid early and often!

Comments

[Frank Rizzo]

Looks like all your bidders are ebay sellers?