Time 43:24

Oh, God, now don’t be getting all upset about me saying Santa uses Giftag. Can you prove Santa doesn’t use Giftag? Exactly. So there.

Giftag is the new gift-registry builder and community platform from Best Buy’s social media team. The best part about it is — get this — it is based on the fundamental principle that the social web is, well, social. That’s why it allows users to build lists from anywhere on the web – not just Best Buy. In my Xmas 2008 list I have warm and toasty long johns (I live in Minnesota, give me a break) from REI, and at Best Buy, an excellent Samsung 46” 1080p flat panel HDTV for an unbelievable price.

This is a major step for any corporation, and Best Buy deserves a ton of credit for implementing a true brand experience that puts the customer first and that accepts the reality that Best Buy customers also need underwear, hats, blankets and plenty of stuff sold all over the place. Isn’t it better to make life easier for those purchases? Yes, and users are thankful for it.

Gary Koelling, senior manager for social technology at Best Buy, was in the Marketing Edge studio and we had a wide ranging conversation, from the concepts of being social to how exactly you can build a list for your Santa’s to check twice, and even check off. That’s my favorite part.

To show Marketing Edge listeners that we too believe it is better to give than to receive, we will fulfill an item on a Giftag wish list. We will purchase a gift for one user of Giftag, like a movie or something that is up to $25. To get in this drawing, here is what you do:

1. Use your IE or Firefox browser and go to www.giftag.com
2. Add the Giftag plug-in
3. Create a profile and a list
4. Add gifts by visiting any sites that have gifts you want
5. In the tag field, include the tag Marketing Edge

On December 20, I’ll review the lists and purchase a gift. See this Santa uses Giftag.
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More Winners

A shout out to Traci Long, the winner of the book Twitter Means Business by Julio Ojeda-Zapata. Traci listens to the Marketing Edge in The Woodlands, Texas, along with her colleagues at Proact Safety Happy Holidays and thanks for listening.

An excellent panel sponsored by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association was convened last night, great crowd and questions. The central question of the night however, seemed to be elusive. The panel was billed as Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise, and it didn’t seem to me that there was a clear answer. Wonderful anecdotes and ways to test social media internally and externally, but no clear answer to the central question, which for me also answers the question.

In general, the conversation about social media among these companies’ and their commentary on social media in the majority of larger companies led me to the following observations:

1) Social media is viewed at best as a tactic to be tested and at worse a side show.

2) Social media is about relationships and those take time, time large companies don’t have given our culture of immediate results. A supporting example of this are loyalty programs that provide a discount for customer, but only if they buy within a certain window. I see how that attempts to accomplish a minor win for the customer and a revenue increase before the end of the quarter for the company, but there is nothing social about that. A catch ‘em, clean ‘em, filet ‘em repeat approach.

3) Social media just doesn’t have the numbers for companies that play in the middle income bracket. Companies on modest and shrinking profit margins are not seeing enough dollars move through their coffers as a direct result of social media. Sure it’s nice to have raving fans embracing your brand, lots of balloons and cake for internal office recognition, but for most senior execs the $ needle isn’t moving far enough in those areas that are directly attributable to social media efforts.

4) Lastly, social media is not viewed as a comprehensive communications platform. So while a retailer may have thousands of loyal fans on Facebook in a program inspired by customer relations, that same understanding about social networks is not shared by say the PR department that dismisses a bloggers inquiry. There is a disconnect in either understanding or appreciation for social media across these large enterprises. When this happens, the cultural tendency is to dig your heels in about your current perspective and not open your mind up to a holistic vision of social media’s implementation throughout the enterprise. There will be more on this topic in a future Marketing Edge podcast with Robert Scoble to be posted June 2.

Panel Members

· Jim Cuene, Director, Interactive, General Mills 
· Brad Smith,  VP of eCommerce & Digital Marketing, Fingerhut Direct Marketing
· Gary Koelling, Creative Director, Social Technology, Best Buy
· Jason Kleckner, Manager, Information Architecture, Target Corporation
· Moderator: Michael Kraabel, Group Creative Director, Gage

Yes I copied this from the MIMA Events page. Thanks

Hat Tips

Gary Koelling – Most candid answers award, he is Twitter gold for any live writer

Jason Kleckner – Best answer of tough question with grace and insight award. Nice job

Here’s a podcast of the MIMA panel Who Controls Social Media in the Enterpriseevent – however, this was an abbreviated file when I downloaded. I’m going to leave the link up just in case it is fixed. Minor gripe here to the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, why isn’t there an audio player on the page for this podcast? There must be a good reason, standing by. If you fix it, I’ll come back and amend this post.

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.