This panel was done differently from the rest at the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference at the beginning of this month.  Instead of a self-moderated panel, event organizer Lisa Picarille moderated this by grilling the two panelists from Best Buy on Blue Shirt Nation (BSN), their internal social network.  The panelists were:

• Steve Bendt, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy
• Gary Koelling, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy

These guys were hilarious AND on target – something that was supposed to help out the advertising guys with selling plasma screen televisions turned into such a great outlet for employees.

Bullet Point Review!

• Started out with a couple hundred users across the network of stores.
• For the first few months it was just a collection of jokes shared with fellow employees.
• Started in June 2006 – by October ‘06 the execs liked it and threw money at them and said, “Grow it.  Fast”.
• They actually gave some of the money back so they could take some pressure off and feel free to fail on the way to growing.
• Used the money to go to the stores around the country to get feedback from employees on what they wanted to use the BSN for.
• It no longer belonged to Steve & Gary; it belonged to the users.
• They needed to build trust – gave out t-shirts and stickers to woo the employees they talked to.
• Part of the success is relate-ability to Steve & Gary but not much.  Gary said, “We can’t be interesting for that long”.
• Members became just as important, if not more, as admins.
• Early on they identified users who had admin potential and promoted some moderators.
• In 2 years they’ve only had to moderate 3-4 posts.
• Mostly users are moderating each other pretty well.
• The average employee age for Best Buy is 22, so these are the social media generation.
• A device/mobile version is coming so execs and higher up employees who rely on these devices more than the average sales clerk can access the BSN readily.
• Have there been any outside benefits? They hosted a video contest to help boost 401-K enrollment – something they thought for sure would fail when the HR department came to them with the idea.  401-K enrollment increased 30% with 40,000 more employees nationwide enrolling.
• Does it help control the “bad stuff” that gets out there?  Not really; they do have about a 50% turnover rate, which is just the nature of retail.
• How do things get acted on?  They pass on feedback to those who need to hear it.  Example: the company was going to announce that they were going to be severely modifying the employee discount and that got leaked to the forums.  Activity skyrocketed with concerned employees who put out there all the reasons why they needed the discount to stay as good as it was.  Management listened and kept the discount unaltered because they not just saw people complaining but saw intelligent discourse on why people wanted it to stay the same, and they agreed.
• There have been a lot of smaller and medium sized issues that corporate has seen on the BSN and acted on.
• Now employees have a voice that matters.
• Has there been an impact on employee retention?  This MAY be coincidental since they have no actual data to back it up, but they did notice that before the BSN, Best Buy had about a 60% turnover rate, and as of a couple of months ago it was down to below 50% for the first time ever.
• Has the venting been positive?  What they see more often than angry venting is organic problem solving & collaboration.  Example: person at store A says they have a fixture that doesn’t look right, person at store B chimes in to tell them it’s the wrong one and who they should call to get the right one.
• They can set up user names like any other social network, but they are traceable back to their employee ID if they break the rules.
• Videos are uploaded almost every day, original music; it’s interesting to watch how people group up, whether it’s by their personal interests, departments they work in, etc.
• BSN is all internal, but one step they took towards being external is BSN Bazaar.  Vendors can set up a room & members can come look up product info.
• Also launched a universal gift registry, GifTag.com.
• Most companies aren’t built for co-creation like this; they’re built for command & control.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• There’s no immediate plan to expand the BSN to consumers.
• When an employee leaves the company, their account is blocked – it’s an HR thing.  They’d love to keep them around; maybe it’s something they can work out in the future.  If they rejoin Best Buy, their account can be reinstated.
• Has there been any correlated rise in sales?  There might be, but they really haven’t been looking at that data or concerned with it.
• Sales aren’t the point.
• Used an open source platform called Drupal to set up the network; had to kill & resurrect it several times in the early days.  Now they have a great relationship with the Drupal developers.
• There haven’t been any cases of management retribution that they know of.  The closest they could remember was that someone complained (rather clearly and thoughtfully) about a particular product line the store carried and their negative opinion of it.  Someone in purchasing, probably related to the decision to carry that line, saw it and asked them to remove all the posts.  They refused because the employee hadn’t broken any rules and they were honoring the social contract.
• Any plans to sell this to other businesses?  No, they’re not in that business.

Fascinating stuff; it’s great that the Blue Shirt Nation has stuck to the social contract of being for the employees and isn’t violating that with some evil corporate agenda.  Sounds like something more retail chains might consider doing.

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