by Albert Maruggi
Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt were about to become popular guys in the 140,000-employee Best Buy corporation. They led the effort to build an internal social-networking site.
Their objective was to obtain more information about customer likes and dislikes through the blue-shirt-wearing sales associates on the floor of the sprawling entertainment and appliance retail giant. This information would help Best Buy create more effective advertising. "If you get a decent problem to solve, you can make decent advertising," Koelling said.
Bendt conducted in-person interviews with sales associates, a process that produced great information but was time-consuming and not very scalable.
The mission: replicate the real-world experience online, make it scalable, and dig up more good information.
Koelling, a self-described journalist with little technology development knowledge, started working with an open-source content management tool called Drupal (www.drupal.org).
Little did they know that their internal social network (not too long ago, these were called intranets) for communication and collaboration was about to give them a whole lot more than they originally desired. One of the lessons learned: When you provide a forum for conversation, be ready for anything.
Listen, Provide, Learn
Getting contributions from your community and encouraging interaction are critical elements of an internal corporate Web site. If people don't use the site, you have a corporate platform that, according to Bendt, "sucks."
After the first version of the BlueShirt Nation social platform, as it was called, Bendt and Koelling were told by a handful of beta users that it needed some work. Koelling was a bit more descriptive: "They said it was ugly, dry, and it's boring."
Bendt said they learned that if you want people to use a "social" site, you need to be open to their participation in building the site. You see, social sites are not about the people or company that builds the site; they are completely about the people who are intended to use them.
Those users represented the Best Buy "blue shirts," usually "early twenty-somethings" who were candid about what they wanted and how the site should act. This is a generation that is cynical of marketing gimmicks and corporate "feel-good" programs and quick to share opinions with you—or with the world via YouTube.
The retail industry has a huge employee turnover rate: 40-60 percent. By incorporating user input in developing BlueShirt Nation, Best Buy was able to create a meaningful experience that is helping to reduce employee turnover: The rate for employees who use BlueShirt Nation is 8 percent.
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