Connecting thousands of high turnover, twenty-something retail employees into some sort of cohesive and connected online network would seem worthy of senior executive leadership, strategy formation, funding, project managers and endless meetings to ensure that it was aligning with the goals and objectives set forth at the outset. None of that happened with one of the most visible employee social networks yet deployed, BlueShirtNation.com, which is Best Buy’s blue, polo-shirted retail employee online network for internal use only.
Instead Gary Koelling, now Senior Manager of Social Technology at Best Buy, was in the advertising department with his colleague, Steve Bendt (also now a Senior Manager of Social Technology). These two went ahead and built just such a network and did it on the cheap and outside the confines of the organization. As you’ll soon learn, they did so with great success, but this is a cautionary tale.
The BlueShirtNation adventure began because these two didn’t think their advertising was as effective as possible and they were wrestling with new methods to reach people in 2006 — especially how to reach those in the Millenials demographic — and had been doing so by going out to the stores and talking to retail employees. As they explored ways in which to connect people and have them be involved with input into messaging and advertising, they’d been playing around with podcasting and some other ideas but hadn’t hit on the right solution.
They knew that employees wouldn’t fill out surveys online or other online feedback mechanisms so Koelling, who had been using the open source content management system Drupal, cobbled together something with that platform in order to test out an idea: building some sort of destination site that employees could use to connect with one another, share content and information, and other typical uses of a social network, giving these ad guys and their department better visibility into what these customer-facing folks were thinking and experiencing in the stores daily.
Fortunately the culture at Best Buy is one of embracing change, experimentation and understanding the benefits of taking risks and sometimes failing. From their Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) project that allows employees to drive toward outcome-based work vs. putting time in at the office to the Women in Leadership Forum (WoLF), Best Buy is an organization willing to leap forward and provide support for the innovative and creative ideas of their people.
As a consequence, Koelling and Bendt quickly gained “air cover” and a small amount of funding to pursue the scalability and feature building required for this Drupal-driven social network with the goal of it being something capable of being used company-wide.
As Koelling and Bendt describe it: “It started with an idea — an idea that we couldn’t get sponsored. The idea was to create a place where employees could talk to each other. The hope was that we could learn more about what our customers were going through in the stores so we could create better marketing. People loved the idea, they talked about it, supported it, but no one would fund it.
So in June of 2006 blueshirtnation.com went online — funded by Gary Koelling. For the domain name and a year of hosting it cost a hundred dollars. The software that built the site was free. There was one user, the administrator.
After the initial hacked version was live and there was a usable prototype, people started to take notice. Management shifted and our new Chief Marketing Officer heard what we were doing. He decided to give us some time, some cover and a little money to see if this thing could grow.”
We know now that BlueShirtNation (BSN) has been a success, but Koelling and Bendt seem a bit dumbfounded by that success and even more so now that they’re being held up as some sort of thought leaders or gurus in the social-media-within-companies space. Instead, they kind of shake their heads as they explain that it was actually a fluke and that THE most important step was that they started.
Even though these two are lauded as thought-leading startup intrapreneurs who must possess some sort of “silver bullet” or able to sprinkle “magic social media pixie dust” over an audience with instructions on how to re-create their success, they will not accept this responsibility.
They’re on their fifth or sixth iteration of the site and it will continue to be honed over time, especially as more people join. 23,000 have signed up thus far and that is a sizeable number — especially since 65% are active at least once per month — but Best Buy has roughly 150,000 employees so 85% of the people in the company are not yet participating. BSN is a work-in-progress and is, as they describe it, one that will always be so.
Quantifying results of BSN is a bit of a challenge — they don’t currently have sophisticated analytics or tools to harvest knowledge or conversations — but another story did illustrate the effectiveness of Best Buy people connecting on BSN. “We delivered 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.”
DEVELOPING THE SITE
Koelling and Bendt gave a presentation at the February 2008 Social Media for Internal Communications conference, where they described their initial development process:
“The first thing we did was get to know the people that we thought would want to use it. We held what we called Hack Slams. Twenty volunteers from our stores came to Minneapolis to talk about BSN. We 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.
After the Hack Slams we went out on the road. We 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.” We did both.
While all of this was going on, we tried to stick to a few key principals. Build the site fast, be able to adapt quickly, listen closely. 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. We tried to address the main problem they told us- “My opinion doesn’t matter.”
Building upon an open source, content management system like Drupal could’ve been a support challenge, though with no budget there wasn’t any way BSN could have been started without using free software.
Koelling didn’t express any second thoughts about building on Drupal, and he and Bendt told a fun story about one experience working with the responsive and strong community surrounding this open source project that is telling:
“We needed some help trying to get a module to work and there was this student from Italy whom we met through the Drupal forum, his name is Fabio, and it turned out he’d worked on that module. “Could we pay you to help us?” we asked, but he was a student, he cautioned us several times that it would “be expensive,” and that we’d have to wait until he was done with his school term. When he was finally available, he completely re-configured the module, we gave him a login in to BSN so he could install and configure it, and he finally billed us for the incredibly low sum of $500! We even paid him via PayPal!” The guys chuckle about this since it illustrates the true nature of the skunkworks that BSN was, and in some respects still is, today.
In a show of Drupal and open source community support, the BSN team has even placed modules back into the community.
WHAT’S NEXT?
In general, employees using BSN talk about how to make Best Buy a better place. Improve on the things they don’t do well, share the things that the company does do well, talk about and express the culture that they hold, and even talk about experiences they have had with customers — both good and bad.
Koelling and Bendt are now involved in a new, stealth adventure at Best Buy that is social media related (and you’ll hear more about this on Minnov8 in the coming weeks), though they’re still actively sought out for advice about how others can repeat their BSN success within other companies.
They don’t think others can, and this is truly why BSN is seen as a fluke by these guys.
They both strongly believe that — unlike the culture within Best Buy — in most companies this sort of effort is a top-down, strategy/project/planned adventure. There is pressure to move fast; it looks dangerous and seemingly fraught with all sorts of legal and human resource risk; it flattens the organization; empowers employees to talk about the good (and especially bad) about the company and its leadership; measurement will be critical and demanded; and there will be a drive toward perfection before it’s launched….and it will fail miserably.
Their advice? Start small. Find the people that are passionate about it. Give them freedom, give them cover when they need it, give them a small budget, and most of all, give them time. Let them learn, let the idea grow, and encourage them to fail. Better yet, require them to fail and often.