Best Buy Using Social Media for Employee Engagement

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

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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:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqpKgTmkHIk]

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.