Best Buy Using Social Media for Employee Engagement

bestbuygary.jpg

Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling from Best Buy presented on their Blue Shirt Nation project. Gary blogged his script in advance.

bestbuysteve.jpg

I can’t add much to Gary’s detailed notes, except to say that this shows both the power of unleashing employee creativity, and how it can be done for almost no money. They got employees involved in a contest to promote the retirement campaign through videos uploaded to the site.

Out of 140,000 employees (almost all young), they had a 30 percent increase in people signing up for 401(k) accounts.

I’d like to be able to share the video that they showed, the winning video in the contest, but it’s not on YouTube (at least I couldn’t find it.) It’s only available on Blue Shirt Nation, and you can only get to that site if you are a Best Buy employee.
Maybe they will upload it or include it in an update on Gary’s blog.

Update: Thanks to Lana in the comments below for pointing to the video on YouTube:

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=VqpKgTmkHIk" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','youtube.com']);">http://youtube.com/watch?v=VqpKgTmkHIk</a>

They used Drupal to create this and spent about $100 initially to get the domain name. Drupal is open source.

Here’s a contrary view about the program.

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2 Comments

  1. Lana Ong
    Posted February 7, 2008 at 6:00 pm | Permalink

    Here’s the youtube link for the video:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqpKgTmkHIk

  2. Paula Cassin
    Posted May 22, 2008 at 12:42 pm | Permalink

    I just love that video.. Just got back to the blog after a couple of months and see you’ve posted it – THANKS. I wish I was that funny.

7 Trackbacks

  1. [...] set of tips has much to commend it, but it runs directly counter to what the Best Buy experience was with their Blue Shirt Nation project, which we heard about earlier today. They started with at $100 budget and used open source [...]

  2. [...] the five comments so far, it seems that on a search for blue shirt nation this blog typically shows up #4 in the rankings (#8 was the lowest) and for best buy blue shirt [...]

  3. [...] and makes employees feel like they have a stake in the company. Yet my friend Cam Gross, who runs Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation site, told me to keep execs out of my employee social networking site to avoid that [...]

  4. By Change Leaders at LottaGuru on January 14, 2009 at 8:01 pm

    [...] out Blue Shirt Nation, in which Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson has signed off on a collaborative social network within Best [...]

  5. [...] we entered Best Buy on a mission, ready to purchase.  This, you’d think, would be any blue-shirt nation citizen’s dream [...]

  6. [...] of these objectives are answered here (Best Buy Uses Social Media for Employee Engagement) and also in a stunning video by Jason Falls regarding the retail giant Best Buy deploying its own [...]

  7. [...] 4. How do we combine a work tool with a social tool? Check out Social Media Tool’s for Work and Learning and also Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation. [...]

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