Today I want to show you how Best Buy’s execution culture helped make Best Buy’s Social Media Story happen. An execution culture is about taking your corporate values and making them explicit and actionable, and that means taking them beyond the organization in today’s world of social media.
This is the 3rd in a series of posts on “Cooking up Social Media with the Right Ingredients.” First I shared my recipe for successful execution and wrote about how Walmart’s Elevenmoms externalizes their “saving money” value and taps into powerful customer communities that share this value. Then I told you about Best Buy’s incredible social media journey led by Gina Debogovich. So let’s look at the recipe and see how Best Buy’s execution culture laid the foundation for Gina’s social media journey:
Take corporate touchstone.
A touchstone is a promise to your customers, a promise about who you are and what value you bring to the relationship. In I’d Fly Costco I talked about Boeing and Costco’s promise to their customers, and how they have everything stacked up behind that promise.
Best Buy is a big box retailer of something like 155,000 employees and $45B in revenue, making most of its money selling goods that are fast becoming digital. It had to transition to stay with their customers. Best Buy had to move from a product company to a solutions company, and embrace a huge range of possible solutions. It had to adopt a new touchstone, what they called “The Company as Wiki.”
Becoming a solutions company is hard and “Adopting “The Company as Wiki” was the only way to do it, and the most exciting way to do it.” said Best Buy then CEO Brad Anderson in conversation with Peter Hirshberg in 2008.
Distill simple and clear corporate values
To fulfill a promise as “Company as a Wiki”, in a business with literally thousands of possible customer solutions, the company had to pull in knowledge from all of its 150,000 employees. It needed transparency and trust to do that.
Kathleen Edmond, Best Buy’s Chief Ethics Officer, talks about transparency like this: “By making ethics a completely transparent dialogue, Best Buy can be a leader in ethical standards for our employees, our customers, and our shareholders. Please feel free to join the conversation.”
Barry Judge, Best Buy CMO, talks about trust. He encourages us to trust our customers and our people: “Consumers are giving us all kinds of information if we choose to listen it. Social media is an incredible source of information to help us gleam what people want” and “We have hundreds if not thousands of employees on Facebook and Twitter, talking about Best Buy, talking about what they do at Best Buy. We don’t have an official regulated policy around it, we encourage it.”
Barry puts it all together: “People tell their dreams to people they trust, and transparency builds trust.” Gina had realized conversations were happening about Best Buy brands in social media and applied these values of transparency and trust to become part of these conversations.
Combine with matching tools and processes
Best Buy has a whole suit of internal social media tools for communication and innovation, “tools that match our values”.
Jennifer Rock, Director Internal Communications explains: “Most companies traditionally communicate at employees, they send a message to employees, the message gets received – you hope – and now we’re done. But that’s not how the world works anymore.”
These internal social media tools deserve a blog post each, but the quick line up is:
- Blue Shirt Nation: social networking site like MySpace for employees
- Watercooler: online discussion forum that allows employees to talk about whatever is on their minds, used by teams, “fastest way to distribute information across the entire store”
- Wiki: Knowledge base, customer feedback and product know-how.
- Loop Marketplace: employees can post innovation ideas for feedback and funding.
- TagTrade – prediction market – a stock market game where stocks are future events or future outcomes. “If I am leading a project and the stock is will this thing launch on time, if the stock price goes down I instantly know something has happened.”
Stir continuously.
“Stir continuously” means that organizations must work at social media execution, every day and every time. As Brad Anderson explained when discussing what Best Buy had to do to make “Company as a Wiki” real: “This absolutely flips the role of the leader. Ideas from the field have an authenticity”. The new leader is not divining the great right strategy but has the curiosity to do the right kind of listening. “We weren’t built to do this. This is murder on middle management. Actually the more senior the management is, the worse it is.”
Or as Jeff Severts, EVP, puts it “Big companies are like communist countries – we all know how well communist countries worked. At some point they fell apart, not because the leaders were dumb, but because nobody would tell the leaders at the top, who had to make decisions, what decisions to make.”
Serve up to every customer, every time.
As Gina said at the Enage!Expo, “our employees are already talking to customers.” In a climate of innovation, transparency and trust, Gina took this concept and went from no presence on social media to a market leader in two short years. Blue Shirts on Twitter, aka Twelpforce, is more of what they do well – more talking with customers. And Gina didn’t need to be the CMO to make this happen because she was applying Best Buy’s values.
Keep fresh.
Gina’s social media initiative grew up these last two years as Best Buy worked on becoming “The Company as Wiki.” Best Buy’s execution culture enabled fresh ideas to take hold and expand within and without the company. Best Buy now has a new CEO, Brian Dunn, and a new focus on local growth and connected digital services. Best Buy is changing fast to keep pace with the market and their customers. In this period of fast change Brian Dunn talks about their corporate values as the “rudder we all share”. I have confidence these new ingredients will bake up some great and surprising new cuisine.
The Best Buy execution culture ingredients may not be for everyone and we should avoid the tyranny of the anecdotal, but the recipe will work with your own unique ingredients. Whatever you do, remember that every interaction is perceived as personal and deliberate by your customers and your community, so make sure your company’s values are reflected and supported by your social media strategy, inside and out.
Happy Mixing and hope to see you at the cook-off.
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