Below is a presentation I gave this week in Boston at Intranet Week.  Some of the content is similar to what we’ve talked about before.  But something hit me about 2 weeks ago after I read a blog in Read Write Web.  It talked about how companies using White Label networks are struggling.  The reasons they stated for the failures were largely based on technology.  I feel they missed a big consideration- the need to understand and adapt to a culture- and the need to turn ownership over to the community.

Cam Gross had a nice post last week on the topic- see it here.

Here’s the presentation…

Today I was going to start in on the story of BlueShirt Nation- a social network inside Best
Buy for our employees.  And I’ll still get into  detail about the site in a little bit.  But last week, I
read a blog post on Read Write Web.  It was talking about white label social networks and
how companies are sinking millions into "creating communities" and no one is showing up. 
They asked the question "How would you feel if you spent more than $1 million throwing a
party and less than 100 or even 1,000 people showed up? "

According to Wall St. Journal coverage of this study, "Thirty-five percent of the [corporate]
online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than
1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1
million on their community projects."

According to the study’s author, the biggest problems are the following:
    * Overpriced, shiny features.
    * Insufficient and inexperienced community management. (See our massive post on
community management earlier this week.)
    * Bad metrics and criteria.

Those might be true, but from our experience, I can tell you they missed a few things.  

I would bet that the companies who rolled them out took the approach everyone is used to-
build it big, push it down from the top, and they will come. 

I’d guess they didn’t ask the users decide what the community should be, how it should look,
and what it should do.  In other words- adapt it to your unique culture. 

Like most corporate initiatives, they probably tried and expected to "build a community"
overnight. 

So I make those comments because this is familiar territory- we went through a journey that
took us down every path you can think of.  And we failed a lot.  And we learned a lot.  And
quite honestly, what BlueShirt Nation became was completely different than what we set out
to do.

As it sits today, 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.

24,000 employees have signed up. All have come to the site voluntarily 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.

Like I said, 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.

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.

Because in our culture, in our stores, with our 19 year old employees, 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.

To help build that trust, 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
face to face 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.”

Through all these conversations, we learned why people in our culture would use a social
network.  Why it would be meaningful.  Essentially they told us they were interested in 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.  And we supported it and fed it with things that people could rally behind.

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.

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
So why did it work?  The first reason is a blessing.  We didn’t have a budget.  Because of
that  we used 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.

The second is failure. We’re good at it. We fail weekly and we kind of like it. We try tons of
new things, some stick and some don’t. Most don’t. But we do it in a low criticality
environment. We do it so it doesn’t cost us a lot of money or make an investment on our part
that we’re too proud to give up.

And when we fail, people forgive us and we learn. We do our best to be human on BSN- to
be Gary and Steve on the site- not the BlueShirt Nation admin team. We built real
relationships with the users, protect them when they need it, respond as quickly as we can,
and ask for forgiveness when we screw up.

By doing that, its turned into a community of our best employees. We have 24,000 of them
on the site. 50-65% are active meaning they come back at least once a month. In a company
with a 60% turnover rate, the members of BSN turnover at a rate of 12%. We are getting the
most engaged employees on the site and talking about how to make the company better.
Now I realize that all of you can’t go off and work with an open source platform and your
culture is different.  But I can offer this advice, whether you look to a white label or something
more custom. 

Remember you’re at the mercy of the people that you’re trying to influence. If you try to force
it, it will stink.  It will feel contrived – you’ll have 100 people at your million dollar party. 

Understand the social contract you need to write with your employees, for your company, for
your culture.

And start to understand that by admitting that 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 and employees 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’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 its ROI.
So what do you do? Try. Fail. Fail fast. Then try again

Good Luck. And have fun.

Tags: act, best buy, culture, integrity, listen, listening, not knowing, people, social, social technology, technology