Below is a presentation I gave at the Social Media Summit in June.  Gary Koelling was supposed to join me but was sick.  The presentation below talks more about our process than past presentations.  This process is something that evolved over the last 2 years and has been the result of dozens of projects- BSN included.

 

What is BlueShirt Nation? BSN?
BlueShirt Nation is a robust community of people with a common interest, they all work for Best Buy. They share knowledge and best practices. Frustrations, aspirations and jokes.

Within a year of launching, 22,000 have signed up. All have come to the site from referrals or through word of mouth. They form groups, make friends, stay in touch and prop each other up. They help each other. They generally seem to like each other.
BlueShirt Nation today is not what it set out to be. Not what its architects had in mind.

So here’s how it started…
Ours started very much the same way as others. We – Corporate – wanted to talk to our store employees about our customers. Find out what they were saying. What they were doing. How they were feeling. We wanted to know how we could talk to them differently though our marketing. We wanted our store employees to tell us.

Many call it market research, we called it co-creation. Here we have 140,000 live bodies breathing the same air as our customers. Surely they can’t wait to tell us everything we want to know, can’t wait to co-create with us. We’d simply input a question and for the price of asking, an answer would be given. Like soda from a vending machine.

ROLL UP
In June of 2006 blueshirtnation.com went online. We planned to launch it big.
Roll Up was our first slogan. The concept of Roll Up had all the tricks we learned from advertising.- tight
design, a bus tour across the country with rock bands and Dane Cook. It was a big splash to launch this
awesome new social network for Best Buy.

But after a few days of concepting, we realized it sucked. It’s embarrassing now but it’s important to
recognize why it sucked. It sucked because we came up with the concept in a vacuum. We didn’t talk to the people we thought would want to use the site. We thought it was cool for a day. It was dorky. The important thing is we dropped it. Luckily for us, we had to admit we were in new territory and we didn’t know enough.

Roll Up helped us realize we needed to do the one thing that didn’t feel intuitive- give up control. We invited 20 volunteers from our stores to what we called Hack Slams. The purpose was to tear apart BSN and try to get a little smarter.

We all sat in a room, talked politely about what it is and then went bowling. We went bowling to get to know each other. We took cameras. We ate pizza. We came back and got honest.
We talked about what really sucked about the current site. We took the pics and videos from bowling and posted them to the site. We talked about what it would take for them to use the site. We made changes to BSN right there in the room. Then we talked about those changes.

We talked about things like trust and anonymity on the site. We talked about things that would ruin the
experience for them and make them never come back. We talked about the things that would make them
want to tell others to join.

Whether we knew it or not, in that room over those 2 days, we wrote the social contract that we were all
bound to. We walked away knowing that this wasn’t going to be the vending machine we thought it would be.

We couldn’t insert question and an answer wouldn’t plop out.

Here’s good place to ask why. Why didn’t we make it mandatory? Why didn’t we just require people answer a battery of questions on a regular basis the answer to which could be collated, indexed and tracked? The simple answer is we didn’t have the authority. We were two guys buried just beneath middle management who were supposed to be churning out straight-up marketing communications. So when we went and asked retail employees to answer questions about customer behavior, they did so only as volunteers. As peers. And besides, there were plenty of other groups making demands of retail employees with limited success.

Trust was the only thing that could make the site work. People would only use it if they trusted it. If they
could talk about whatever they wanted- not just Best Buy. Our employees needed to own the site- determine how it evolved, what was acceptable, what it did, even what it looked like.  That being the case, we needed to talk to the people that we wanted to use the site.

After the Hack Slams we went out on the road. Gary, myself and a handful of volunteers personally visited 130 stores across the country. We brought stickers and t-shirts. We met with thousands of employees and told them a simple message. “We built a site that’s kind of like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Digg. Its just for Best Buy employees. Here’s a t-shirt- will you check it out?. If you like it, tell others. If you think it sucks- go ahead and post it on the site.” They did both.

While all of this was going on, we tried to stick to a few key principles. Build the site fast, be able to adapt quickly, listen closely, and fail often. We focused on winning the trust of the most skeptical audience which was our store employees. We did that by talking 1:1 with them in our store visits. Promoting the site in ways that were frankly counter culture.

Using these principles led us to using free software, free as in open and free as in no cost. Because we
weren’t experts in software building or site building or even community building, the tools we needed had to
be

1) easy to learn and master. Because we were working without the corporate IT safety net we needed to be able to share the work we were doing with anyone who could help us which meant the tools needed to be

2) widely accessible. And because not only did we not really know what we were doing, but we were sure that whatever we did would be wrong and need to be changed quickly, the tools needed to be 3) easily adapted. As a result we ended up building a tool, a site, that was 1) easy to learn and master 2) widely accessible and

3) easily adapted. The site’s purpose evolved from a place where we could try to get answers to a place where employees could address a bigger problem- the feeling that – “My opinion doesn’t matter.” A re-org had started. An organic movement that made people feel they had a say. That they mattered.

U R BIG
And it worked. People started to show up. Then they went beyond showing up and actually started to stick around. They talked about what was important to them.

Like a Geek Squad Agent who had a niece that was born 12 weeks prematurely. He was asking for people’s thoughts and prayers.

Or a Supervisor from Iowa who was serving in Iraq giving her fellow employees an update.
It was open to the user as to what they wanted to talk about.

The one thing they all had in common was Best Buy. Since that was the case, the majority of the conversation revolved around their collective experience as employees of Best Buy. In general, they talk about how to make Best Buy a better place. Improve on the things we don’t do well, share the things that we do do well, talk about and express the culture that we have, talk about customers- both good and bad.

They bring their perspective- whether its a cashier from store 264 in Columbia South Carolina or a GM from Las Vegas. Each brings their point of view and each has the power to create real change.
They’ve impacted huge changes to Best Buy.

Like the 401K Challenge- a video contest hosted on BSN to
promote enrollment in our 401K. The simple assignment of creating a video in your words that tells others about the benefits of the 401K program.

The buzz and impact of the contest resulted in a 30% increase in 401K enrollments. That’s 40,000 employees signing up for the 401K that hadn’t before.

The site has also helped push our culture to embrace innovation and collaboration from anywhere. Here’s a video that 2 users put together- its had a huge impact on employees and leadership. It challenges people to think differently.

The site began to answer a fundamental question or problem most employees (if not all employees) were
facing. I feel small. I feel like I don’t really count.

YOU CAN’T KNOW ENOUGH
BlueShirt Nation is the result of a reorganizing force that’s coming to bear on American Corporations. Its the result of the spread of social technology that’s easy to learn and master, widely accessible, and easily adapted.

The result is that the social contract is being rewritten. The nature of our relationships to each other is being redefined. Organizing as a hierarchy is no longer enough. A network is no longer defined as names in a rolodex or an outlook address book – it how we organize, connect and collaborate. To make stuff. To do stuff. To know stuff. As we learned fast (because we failed fast)

It’s a two-way street: It’s less about what we (Corporate or branders) want to say, and more about what our employees and customers want to tell us, and how we respond to them. Which leads to the next theme…

The need to listen: We need to acknowledge that, in order to participate in the social media conversation, we don’t control the communication any longer. To succeed here, we need to learn to listen better, then respond in ways that your customers will value

Develop your social skills: For us to succeed, we had to act like a sociable person. That means listen. Be
interesting. Be relevant. Offer something of value. Be worth being heard and attended to. Brands are going to have to figure out how to behave like people. You can’t show up at the party in a leisure suit anymore and expect to get laid. It’s not going to happen. You’re going to have to show up and behave like a decent human being.

The need to try: Large corporations haven’t figured all this social media stuff out, either. No one has “cracked the code” on harnessing it, controlling it, measuring it, etc. – and maybe never will. It’s more about the opportunity cost of not being there, than what is its ROI.

So what do you do? Try. Fail. Fail fast. Then try again

Good Luck. And have fun.