garykoelling

Got an email from a college student doing a summer paper on social networks. Here's my response:

Adriana,

So these are some pretty tough questions but I’ll do my best.

“What has Best Buy accomplished by launching the site [BSN]?”
I think BSN gives Best Buy a communication platform that is non-hiearchical.  Because there is a certain level of anonymity on the site users feel more like peers with other users. This is important for everyone along the hierarchy spectrum from the COO to the cashier at a store in Riverside, CA.  It allows people to engage in honest dialog and get to know each other as humans - something that’s easy to forgo in a giant corporation.

“What are some of the disadvantages?”
I think it’s incredibly easy for people to forget the ‘social’ part of a social network. In some ranks there is a tendency to look at the BSN community as a vending machine for answers without understanding that the answers they are looking for require good questions and relationships. You can’t just walk into a cocktail party without knowing anyone and expect to hook up just because you showed up.

“What are some of the ways you keep people active in this online community?”
At first we thought we’d have to bribe people to contribute. We ran contests and gave out awards. But what they really wanted was tool that was valuable on it’s own. A place to easily find other people I have stuff in common with so I can share my stories. So we spend most of our time listening to what the users want and rolling out those features in ways that are easy to use.

“How do you know it’s working? What metric do you think is most important to measure?”
 I wish I had a really brainy answer for this one but I don’t. I guess how you define whether or not it’s working is the first step. For me it’s a laboratory that lets me learn. For others it’s a way to share best practices. I must admit I do look at how many users show up every day and how long they stay. But that doesn’t really reflect the total impact. Culturally it has had a huge impact on how people think about solving problems and how they think about their coworkers - as more than their title. So for me, I measure the amount and impact of the stories it generates - more stories means it’s working better.

“Why an employee network? How did Best Buy decide that this was the best way to tap intot he social network stream?”
The average age of a Best Buy employee is like 20. They’re right in the prime demo. But the real reason was to get a better for what’s happening across the whole enterprise. We’ve got around a thousand stores scattered over the US - it’s hard to keep everyone connected and get a feel for what’s going on. As it turns out, it’s been a great place for us to get educated on how to use social networks without appearing clueless.

Visualized text from a recent BSN presentation using wordle

We're essentially presenting the same story about BSN that we presented in February in SF. The audience slightly different this time and so we'll tweak the information a bit. This time, instead of saying, "You can't do this" and here's why, we thought maybe we should talk a little bit about where we think things are moving and how to take advantage.

A reorganizing force is coming to bear on American Corporations (from inside and outside) as a result of the spread of social technology that is 1) easy to learn and master 2) widely accessible 3) easily adapted. The result is that companies are no longer the sole purveyors of cultural content. In fact, they are being forced to become consumers of cultural content for maybe the first time since the dawn of the mass communication era. This new found and often unwelcome and disconcerting role of cultural peer has the effect of revealing a long-masked sociopathic nature of American companies.

I feel like I need to take just a second here and clarify a couple things about BSN (BlueShirt Nation). The presentation notes that I published under breaking it down for internal communicators for the conference “Social Media for Internal Communication” have been referenced a few places out on the interweb. Awesome, but; “Best Buy claims their social network reduces turn over” and “How an internal social network can dramatically reduce turnover ” worry me. These posts present a correlation as causal. Ruh roh.

Here's what the presentation said: “In a company with a 60% turnover rate, the members of BSN turnover at a rate of 8.5%.” What that means is the members of the site turn over at a rate lower than the company average. Why? Not sure why. Could be lots of things. There are many variables. The presentation also states, “We are getting the most engaged employees on the site and talking about how to make the company better.” That means that we think that employees who are engaged (dig their jobs or at least dig Best Buy) are more likely to be members of BSN than those who aren't engaged. Participation in the site is voluntary so the people who show up do it because they want to.

There are many other factors that need to be examined to really parse the 8.5% statistic. Like who are they, what do they do, how long have they been employed, and on and on. Jumping to the conclusion that BSN or any corporate social network reduces turnover, while I'd love to make that claim, is a dangerous mistake.

/clarification

This week's podcast isn't explicitly about BSN . In fact, BSN isn't really mentioned at all. This week we talk about Giftag . The reason it's part of the BSN podcast series is because we are drawing heavily from the lessons learned in building BSN, the greatest of which may be failing. Learning how to fail, how to fail fast, how to fail in the middle and how to fail on the edge. We do this in the belief that whoever fails fastest wins, or succeeds or is accepted. This is a reflection of our belief in the value of intellectual process over intellectual property. Intellectual property is more expensive to produce and defend. It also has a tendency to restrict one's creative field of vision.