Best Buy’s CMO Barry Judge shared his views on social technology today during an interview with Francois Gossieaux for the Marketing 2.0 community. Some highlights:
Value of social media
1. Dramatic improvement in quality of work through collaboration: “It’s become real clear to me that the best ideas aren’t from any person or even a small group of people. The best ideas come from collaborating among people with multiple points of view, inside and outside the company. Social technology provides the way to scale and do this.”
2. Trust: Building trust and being trusted by consumers: “The other thing I’m real clear about is the value of being transparent and open with people and sharing freely what we know. To build trust you have to be open and transparent. What you write needs to be real.”
3. Reality check, constantly monitoring what’s being said: “I have a ticker tape like feed of what’s being said about Best Buy — good and bad. It reminds everyone that the conversations are happening out there.”
4. Help realize Best Buy’s differentiator, which is its people. “Social media is about making yourself more interesting, vulnerable, human, open. People want a relationship with people. Also, social media helps you have more interesting conversations that help you think about ideas differently, and engage with people with similar passions.”
Social media strategies
- Watercooler: internal forum that enables conversations on business topics
- Loop: Red Dragon like capability where ideas are put on loop and people vote on them, and can invest in them. Helps best ideas rise to top.
- Prediction Markets: Best Buy internal stock market for ideas, e.g., Will Best Buy open a store in China this year? It’s a way to get information to flow throughout the company.
- Blue Shirt Nation: lifestyle kind of social network for employees, like MySpace. More social, while business issues discussed on Watercooler.
- Open APIs on BestBuy.com: opened up code on bestbuy.com to developers so that they can help company build better utilities/applications for shopping at Best Buy. First large scale retailer to opne up its architecture.
- Sharing casting tapes for commercials: people can comment on commercials as they’re being developed; we get good input about what people have to say — and people get to know more about our strategy by being involved in the advertising process.