Yesterday Jeremiah Owyang was at Best Buy and we had the chance to sit down with him for a couple hours.  One of the things that we talked about was the age old problem anyone working in social tech faces:

“How do you get people/collegues/executives to understand the importance of social and more importantly, how do you help them get comfortable with participation?”

Jeremiah reinforced one of the tenets that we believe in.  Start small and start internally.  We’ve talked about that as the simple idea of practice.  As weird as it sounds, people have to practice being social in the online space.

For lots of reasons, the corporate hierarchy that we’ve all grown up in has trained us to behave less like individual humans representing a brand and more like a homogonized entity.  The only way to break free of this is find your voice, to get comfortable, and just like in real life, act like a decent human being who is looking to make friends.

Sounds easy but it freaks people out-When we try to convince people to try, you can smell the fear.  People are scared of looking stupid, about having the right thing to say.  All the same fears we had as kids trying to impress or make new friends.

And that’s where practice starts.  Just as you had to feel your way through all those awkward years in puberty, highschool, college, then your comfortable work life, you have to push yourself to grow and to change once more.   The safest place to to that is inside the organization.  Set up tools that let you practice before you hit the streets and try with your customers.

Dan Haugen, a local writer, recently wrote an article on Best Buy’s journey to becoming more social.  You can read the article here.  I think it does a nice job of showing how practicing internally is leading to really cool things on the outside.

I’m going to be completely honest- I wish BlueShirt Nation wasn’t the focal point- its my hang up and I’ll get over it.  That said, what BSN represents is important.  It let us, as an organization, practice being social.   It led to the development of more tools in the organization (Loop Marketplace, Watercooler, BSN Mix) that let us practice being more social.  These tools helped legal practice getting comfortble with new policy.  They helped executives see the power of transparency in action.  And they utlimately led us to the place we are today- trying hard to figure out an open social approach to strengthening relationships with our customers by sharing our values, our knowledge, and our individual people.  See more about one of the recent experiments here.

UPDATE 4/10 8P CST:  Just saw Jeremiah Owyang posted his thoughts on our use of internal social tools.  Read his post here.

Tags: bestbuy, open, practice, social