Time 14:03

Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt were Best Buy advertising guys in search of better information about the customer experience. Their first stop was the blue shirt sales associates on the floor of Best Buy stores who interact with customers everyday.

In their quest they developed an internal communications platform that generated thousands of conversations across the company. The result, more information, more issues, more solutions, more ideas, more impact — and a corporate culture that is beginning to appreciate that buy-in brings out the best in employees.

I visited Best Buy to interview Gary and Steve who are now senior managers for social technology based on the success of their 18 month experiment. They acknowledge that their focus on listening to the type of environment the employees wanted was essential for the employees participation. Without that they knew they would have nothing.

The images in this post are from Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation social network. Fun and interesting. Certainly designed to set a certain mood and create a welcoming atmosphere. They were inspired by Blue Shirt Nation users as Steve and Gary listened to their thoughts about making the site user-friendly.

Here’s my take on what they found as essential elements to a successful corporate social network platform.

1. Bottom up process to let users of the site help build the platform
2. Management that is willing to discover what their employees are capable of innovating
3. A willingness to act on the good ideas hashed out in the conversation of the group
4. Listen all the time to the conversations inspired by the users.

On a technology note, Blue Shirt Nation was built with the open source code Drupal www.drupal.org.

I will have more on this topic at a presentation I’m giving at the Society for New Communications Research NewComm Forum www.newcommforum.com April 22-25, in Sonoma County, CA – A host of great speakers including Shel Holtz, Paul Gillin, and Joseph Jaffe among others.

Get in on the January book giveaway the New Influencers by emailing me at Marketingedge@providentpartners.net and in the subject line put New Influencers. Good luck the drawing is January 31.

The marketing buzz word in 2007 is community. Marketers are trying to plug into, tap into or leverage these social network communities for their companies’ benefit. Not quite sure that’s the right approach here. Communities can’t be leveraged (one step away from manipulated in my dictionary) to your advantage, that’s old model selling in an environment that essentially rejects being sold to.

Chris Brogan makes a good point about power and the social media tools available for the individual to increase their personal power. http://chrisbrogan.com/social-media-as-personal-power/. I believe marketers should view the growth in these powers not as a function of tapping into, but as an environment to participate in. The verbs I used above, tap, plug, and leverage all involve in varying degrees to take from. It’s best to approach this as something to engage in, join, and contribute to. Subtle difference that will enhance the participation for any marketer evaluating what social media means to their company. I also commented to Brogan’s post.

Time 14:09

You have to love a good headline, one that makes you curious enough to read further. Let’s hope this one worked. In this podcast, we’ll look at nine lessons I’ve learned by running my own business for six years and consulting with dozens of others on their marketing and communication strategies. I learned by keeping my eyes and ears open to the following:

1) what is working and not working in marketing tactics
2) what the Web rewards in terms of search results and attention (like in the blogosphere)
3) what business leaders value and how that affects a marketer’s day

We are grateful to our listeners and the bloggers that have recognized the Marketing Edge among the top business podcasts. Jeremiah Owyang of the Web Strategy by Jeremiah blog, for example, recently included us on an impressive list of marketing podcasts. Thanks. And our listeners have kept us in the top podcasts on iTunes Business, Management and Marketing — last time I looked, #1 when you search for “marketing” in the podcast directory.

The Marketing Edge also made Small Business Trends Radio’s list of the top 100 small-business podcasts. Small Business Trends Radio is a comprehensive program that covers the spectrum of business issues from finance to marketing, hiring to sales.

Here’s a summary of the lessons learned:

1) Be mindful of cash flow, regardless of the size of your company. Whether it is a large corporation’s line item on a marketing budget or the cash on hand for a small business, cash is king, and everyone wants to spend their money as effectively as they can.

2) Document all of the information your company or clients — and all of their audiences — value. Customers, prospects, investors, media, analysts, and social-network communities are all potential audiences that can affect the company’s brand perception, sales and exposure. Once you know what they value, you can deliver it with frequency. I know you know what it is, but have you written it down, placed it where you can see it everyday?

3) Speed, relevance and change are what Web 2.0 values and rewards. Produce content that meets at least two of these criteria and you’ll do well. When things change that are part of your audience’s world, you should be a part of it somehow.

4) We are a transmedia species –- translation: people learn differently. We like to convert what we take in and reprocess what we put out. We like to share things we learn or contribute our own individual ingredients to what we learn. This all means that you need to use every medium that helps you tell a powerful story. Video, if you are showing the complexities of a new product or the emotional impact of a wonder drug for patients and their families. Audio, if you want to engage someone usually while they are doing something else. Print, if they need to scan, review or analyze.

All comments will results in a food item to be donated to a local charity.