Best Buy
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Electronics retailer has built an exemplary internal social network
BlueShirt Nation is
It was originally intended as a mechanism to generate feedback for the company’s internal advertising campaigns. In this regard, it failed. But as a way for Best Buy employees to communicate and engage with their employer, it has been highly successful.
Over 20,000 of the company’s employees have a personal profile (out of around 140,000), and can use the platform to communicate with peers nationwide.
BlueShirt Nation is emphatically not a formal project management and collaboration platform; it remains informal to encourage participation. It is nevertheless a valuable knowledge transfer tool, with employees regularly swapping ideas on how to display products or handle customer complaints, for example.
According to Gary Koelling, the internal advertising executive behind the BlueShirt Nation project, a fifth of the conversations that take place on the site involve some kind of knowledge transfer relevant to work.
This kind of social network is particularly valuable for multi-branch retailers, who tend to have a young but geographically dispersed workforce, and not just because it allows them to share skills and knowledge. It also helps to create a sense community among the employees, helping the company to motivate and retain staff.
