Best Buy’s Collaborative ‘Blue Shirt Nation’

Over the lifespan of my blog, I have looked at how several companies are using new social media tools to collaborate better with their customers and other external stakeholders.  In this post, I will look at how Best Buy has adopted a new tool of their own to increase internal collaboration among employees.

In 2006, two corporate marketers named Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling, created Blue Shirt Nation.  Blue Shirt Nation is a corporate social network site that aims to flatten the organization through increased communication between employees of all levels.  The network provides a voluntary outlet where employees can share encounters with customers, tips for best practices, and ideas to help the company grow. 

 

According to an article by Patrick Thibodeau titled Best Buy Getting Results From Social Network, the network has already helped the company tremendously.  Today there are over 25,000 regular users of the network, from top-level executives to store clerks.  Employees have the chance to share their thoughts, or comment on someone else’s idea.  An example of this collaboration working to help the employees can be seen through the exchanges surrounding an executive’s idea to change employee discounts.  Shortly following the posting of this idea, many employees gave negative feedback on the idea.  The contributions led the executives to reassess their idea, ultimately deciding not to implement any changes.

 

Below is an interview with Jason Falls from Social Media Explorer-TV.  In this clip Jason interviews Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling to find out more about how they came up with the idea for Blue Shirt Nation and some of their initial goals for the online community.

 

 

 

Best Buy is not the only company that is using social media tools to help foster internal collaboration.  Dell Computers has created their own version of Blue Shirt Nation.  Their device is called EmployeeStorm, which illustrates their enthusiasm over the possibilities that may come from having their employees share their ideas.  Sun Microsystems has also created an online community.  According to their website, the goal of this community is to create a space that is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.

 

These tools have helped raise morale, as well as revenues at these companies.  With the amount of success that these new technologies bring to organizations, it begs the question of why more companies are not following suit and creating safe online communities for their employees to participate in.

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Dell’s new Idea(Storm)

Although it took Dell some time to embrace social media, today they are successfully implementing several Web 2.0 technologies into their business strategy.  Following a very public dispute with Jeff Jarvis, creator of BuzzMachine, over the quality of their customer service department, the company created several tools to help.

 

The first of these tools that the company created was IdeaStorm.  The premise behind this tool is to give customers a way to have their ideas heard by executives at Dell.  It is an electronic suggestion box where anyone can post an idea for a new product, or a way to improve an existing product.  After the ideas are posted, the online community votes on the ideas that they like.  Following this step, executives at the company discuss whether or not the ideas are feasible.  Finally, the ideas that pass through all of these steps are put into action. According to  the company’s website, since the inception of IdeaStorm the company has implemented over 200 of the nearly 10,000 suggestions.  This form of collaboration between employees and customers was unprecedented in the business world.  Many people have seen this as a great way to initiate conversation between users and employees following the massive amounts of negative press the company received from Jarvis and other online bloggers.

 

Here is a video interview by Ragan Communication featuring Vida Killian, the manager of IdeaStorm.  In the clip she talks about the concept behind IdeaStorm, as well as how the company uses the tool in great detail.

 

 

Along with IdeaStorm, Dell also initiated a new blogging strategy targeted at consumers and small businesses.  Through this blog, Dell has found out that the more controversial topics that they blog about yields more participation from readers.  This is just another avenue for the company to share ideas with their customers. 

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