As someone who started her career working on oil rigs, the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico really hit home. I know first-hand the intense and often times dangerous activities on a drilling platform, and the enormous coordination effort involved in every drilling program. As I have followed this accident I have been struck again by the potential for Enterprise 2.0 software not just to improve how companies work, but to save lives and ecosystems.

A disaster of this proportion almost always has a series of cascading failures. One was the failure of the Blow-Out Preventer (BOP). The BOP, sitting on the seabed, is the last line of defense in the case of a blowout in a floating rig setup. We have learned that the blowout preventer was modified “in unexpected ways”. But these modifications were not rippled through the dependent processes, systems and tools, or across the different organizations involved. In those crucial hours following the blowout and fire, critical time was lost due to this fact. “When they [BP] investigated why their attempts failed to activate the bore ram [part of the BOP], they learned that the device had been modified. An entire day’s worth of precious time had been spent engaging rams that closed the wrong way.”  A collaboration platform would have shared the modifications to the blow out preventer and ensured that the impact of these modifications would have been understood and acted upon.

The BOP had several issues in the weeks and days leading up to the blowout. There were many red flags during the drilling operation as well. Many decisions were taken by the (many) different companies involved that could be rationalized in isolation. The cumulative effect across such a complex operation was not, however, really understood by anyone. The last few days and hours prior to the disaster are especially telling.  I realize that hindsight is 20-20, but what-if a social network had been part of the culture and tool set of BP (the Operator), Transocean (the drilling company), the mud company, the cement company, the wireline company and so on. A social network would have surfaced the increasingly vocal worries of the crew beyond the confines of the rig, so that more light could have been shed on key decisions leading up to the blowout, perhaps preventing the tragedy.

A drilling operation is a tremendous undertaking – a carefully choreographed integration of moving parts requiring sophisticated operating techniques and advanced technologies. Yet the challenges and failures of collaboration and communication in this global, multi-cultural industry are universal. I joined Schlumberger to see the world and did wireline work on rigs all over the world. Since then I have worked for large Fortune 500 companies, consulting firms and startups. Across all these very different enterprises, and in many different countries and cultures, I have seen these same problems of collaboration and communication occur again and again.

As companies have become more virtual and more diverse, as they have replaced vertical integration with widespread business webs, the execution gap has grown: the difference between what they mean to do and what they actually do grows ever wider. Companies need a social business platform that connects their workforce and their partners, that enables collaboration and that counteracts failures in decision making caused by narrow and isolated points of view.

This disaster would not have happened if the disparate groups in the the many different organizations involved in a drilling operation had been able to collaborate more effectively. A framework of enterprise 2.0 tools that created a social business network would have made a difference.

Companies are looking for new ways to collaborate with their customers to co-create products and services.  But customers are already telling companies a lot about what new products and services they want. Too many companies just aren’t paying attention.

I had an errand to run over the weekend for a new bathroom rug. I hate running errands, but figured this would be quick. I wanted something fun so I headed to Cost Plus. There was an assortment of bath rugs about the right size and in a few different colors, but with no backing.  I am sure there are people who buy bath rugs and then find the appropriate non- skid backing, but I am not one of them. I want a bath rug with a non-skid backing. Seems like a simple wish. There was no one around to ask or to care that I was not finding what I wanted.  I looked at the long check-out line and gave up.

I had a similar experience at Target a 5’ drive away. There was a big assortment of bath rugs, but the fun rugs had the slippery backs, and the rugs with non-skid backs were in the usual boring bathroom colors. I opted for the boring color with the non-skid back, since I was running out of patience, but the size/color combination I wanted was out of stock. And just like at the first store, there was no one around to ask or to care.

I am now two stores and too many minutes into what should have been a simple errand. Maybe this is why I hate running errands. Even what seems like a simple errand isn’t. I am making the ultimate expression of customer loyalty – I am in their store wanting to buy something – but there is no process or system that cares whether I find what I am looking for.

Here I am walking around these stores with practically a neon sign on my forehead saying “I am your target demographic”, and yet I am completely ignored.  Is it really too expensive to collect information from customers in your store?

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, writes in “Delivering Happiness” about the telephone being “one of the best branding devices out there.” Tony goes on to say, “You have the customer’s undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we’ve found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.”  I would think a customer in your store would be an even more powerful branding device.

Companies have a huge opportunity to drive innovation and customer loyalty through the emergent intelligence of their people and their data.  But emergent intelligence requires companies first and foremost to be listening. This means companies need to interact with me in a meaningful way during my shopping experience and capture that data in a useful way.

I’ve written about how big online retailers like Netflix and Zappos can improve the customer experience through Emergent Intelligence. These companies have a lot of information about their customers and their products that they could use in more useful ways, by listening and paying attention to what their customers are telling them through their calls to customer service and through  the kinds of returns they are making.

Big box retailers could do the same if they would blur the line between the online and box shopping experience, letting customers have easy access to the same kinds of useful information in store as online. Best Buy, a company that also excels in social media, has made online product reviews and recommendations available in store as well, merging the online and offline experience and taking advantage of customer-generated content. Of course a retailer could rely on me using my smartphone to get this information, but when I do so I am also checking prices and locations for all of their competitors.  Most companies are giving up this store “real estate” without a compelling in-store alternative.

And box retailers can do more. I’m in the store! I’d love to see retailers trying new ways to engage and interact with their customers. I’d love to see a button on the shelf that says “I would have bought this” for out of stock items, or even a simple “out of stock” slip that I could hand to the checkout.  I’d also like a store to try out the idea of placing easy to use, fun and interactive displays all around the store that let me tell the store what I am not finding, and that use game mechanics to incent and reward me for doing so.

Even better, I’d love for a store employee to have a meaningful conversation with me about what I am looking for, and to capture that information. Imagine how a company value that “our stores are our best marketing device” would change employee recruitment and training as well as the shopping experience.

Meaningful listening and data capture would let companies seamlessly collaborate with their most loyal customers to co-create new products and services. And what’s more, customers would take away a positive and memorable shopping experience.

It is good news for my hometown Palo Alto that Jive Software is moving its HQ here. And it is good news for business too. Jive is clearly getting traction and that is good news for business because Jive sells the kind of software that companies need to enable collaboration and to avoid the problems I outlined in “Let’s talk chickens and e2.0.” The chicken story taught us that companies win or lose based on the performance of their teams, not individuals; and increasingly, on the performance of teams of teams, distributed teams of teams, and networks of teams, customer communities and partners.

Social Business Software, to quote from Jive’s home page, fuels engagement with customers, employees and partners. I’ve written before about the power of social business software to transform businesses:

• By creating a community of shared values like in Walmart’s Elevenmoms initiative.
• By driving employee engagement and alignment demonstrated by Best Buy in “How Best Buy’s Execution Culture Creates Social Media Success.”
• By enabling the intelligence of people to better inform decision making in “What’s wrong with today’s enterprise software? [Emergent Intelligence]” and in “Netflix: Make more customer magic with your people and your data.”

In a recent survey by IBM’s Institute for Business Value reported in Business Week, 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future. These CEO’s understand the equation “Human Capital x Social Capital = Productivity and Innovation.”

Collaboration is far more valuable to productivity and innovation than our current enterprise systems and processes allow for. As Valdis Krebs of Orgnet wrote, to actually get your work done, you tap into the organization sideways, leveraging your informal contacts across the company. Things get done through informal networks, what Nenshad Bardoliwalla calls human integrators of the white space, the space between systems, business processes and job descriptions.

Social Business Software is the foundation for the next generation enterprise, where emergent intelligence from employees, customers, partners and data create and sustain a successful execution culture and create a great place to work.

Social business software is clearly on the move. Welcome to Palo Alto Jive HQ.

[Crossposted on Silicon Angle on 5/27/2010]

My guest post on Blogging Innovation 12/10/09:

As a culture we like to think of our achievements as the triumph of the individual. But last week I used a memorable chicken breeding example to show you that group performance outweighs individual performance in a group environment because a focus on individual performance comes at a cost to the group performance.

The reality is that company performance is a complex group effort.  Without positive group productivity, companies under perform. And most companies under perform. We are used to seeing numbers like 90% of companies fail to execute on their goals, that excellence in business execution is the chief concern of CEO’s. What’s going on here? “Companies assume people are atomistic and economic, versus social creatures”, writes Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton in “The Knowing-Doing Gap, How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action.”

There are two things going on here that get in the way of group productivity, two deeply held organizational operating assumptions that are completely out of sync with reality. The first is that company performance is atomistic. The atomistic model assumes individual control and that company results are the consequence of individual decisions. The second is that individual performance is motivated largely by extrinsic, (financial) rewards based on individual performance.  “Companies operate on oversimplified or incorrect models of human behavior relevant to shareholder (short term) interests, irrelevant or counterproductive for ultimate success of the business.”

In “Managing the 21rst century organization”, Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com reminds us that what you know (human capital) multiplied by who you know (social capital) creates productivity and innovation. Traditional company hierarchies have an up-down formal information flow: you report up the chain, you receive information down the chain. But to actually get your work done, you tap into the organization sideways so to speak, leveraging your informal contacts across the company.

Research sited by Krebs found that “the ability to reach a diverse set of others in the network through very few links was the key to success for both individuals and teams.” We know this from our own experience. A good networker gets more stuff done because companies are not atomistic, they are complex group environments. So if you think about it, with the exception of the few jobs in the company that don’t interact with anyone, you should be interviewing people for their social skills, not their functional skills.

We might be done there, but we’re not. Because relying on social skills and ad-hoc networking is terribly inefficient and capricious. And all too often, it is down right discouraged by performance targets that misunderstand human motivation and pit employees against each other in an endless game of internal competition. At a recent TED talk, Dan Pink, author of “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, made the case for businesses to rethink their “business operating system” :

“There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things. To entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach. “

Innovation and productivity doesn’t happen by carrot or stick, it happens through connectivity. What Pfeffer and Sutton found was that “firms where measurement helped measured things that were core to their culture and values and intimately tied to their basic business model and strategy, and used these measures to make business processes visible to all employees.”

To close the group productivity gap and foster innovation, enable and empower connectivity in your company. This requires you to revisit your assumptions about company performance and individual motivation. So before your write “superstar wanted” in you next job tweet, read the chicken story one more time. Hopefully you will come to realize that “super collaborator” is what you really need. And before you start your quarterly/annual performance goal setting process, listen to Dan Pink’s TED talk one more time on what really motivates and stimulates the kinds of creative solutions you need today.

Finally, think about group productivity as part of an overall business execution platform. The mindful implementation of Enterprise 2.0 emergent social software platforms and performance management solutions are components of a connected company, and a connected company outperforms its peers. What does this kind of emergent business execution platform look like? Stayed tuned.

VW has launched a wonderful initiative called The Fun Theory demonstrating how “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better”. Their video “The Piano Stairs – The Fun Theory” has gone viral with over 3M views on You Tube.

Us business execution folks call this Putting Games to Work. As I wrote in “Playing Around with Customer Loyalty”, integrating proven game mechanics into normal content motivates desired behavior. Game mechanics can help companies fulfill their promise to their customers, and in doing so, drive customer loyalty, retention and revenues.

Bunchball, a leading game mechanics platform, calls this the “Science of Engagement”.  “Promotions are a cold start each time,” said Rajat Paharia, BunchBall’s Founder and Chief Product Officer at Enage!Expo last month. Like other traditional loyalty programs, they only engender loyalty to the program, not the brand. Customers are gone as soon as they find a better offer.

“If we understand what actions on your site impact customer value, then what tools and techniques can be used to increase it? Behavioral incentive and rewards programs, game dynamics and social media tools are all part of the mix,” writes BunchBall CEO Peter Daboll in his Forbes commentary, “A Web of Engagement”.

BunchBall’s customers have some remarkable results to show for building a web of engagement:

• 55% increase in desired behaviors
• Time on site up 20%
• 400%+ increase in page views
• Revenue generating sponsorships
• Users being incented to create the core site content, so that sites “run themselves”
• Increase in visit frequency

These metrics reflect the changing relationship that is possible between company and customer. Warner Brothers, for instance, never had a direct relationship with their customers before. Now they are starting a global loyalty program where website users can build virtual movie sets with virtual goods using WB virtual money, explained Rajat. Another BunchBall customer, NBC, launched a social networking site Dunder Mifflin Infinity, based on the hit series The Office. The DMI site has an “incentive economy – powering a virtual currency, leaderboards, behavior tracking, and virtual goods.” Website visitors are incented to become employees and generate core site content. By motivating users, NBC is able to meet its goal of having the site “run itself” with user-generated content. Comcast is another Bunchball customer and Jean-Claire Fitschen, Director, Games for Comcast, shared the Comcast experience with game mechanics at Engage!Expo. Comcast has achieved higher member conversion and more page views per unique visitor since launching the program. “Status and reputation are highly motivating for some users.”

Rajat also touched on how the science of engagement works internally, too. LiveOps, a virtual contact center solution provider, is using game mechanics to incent employees to complete training programs.

Games are fun, and fun is powerful. Put the science of games to work to help you build and motivate your customers and your team. Gamification is not only the new marketing, but together with the web of engagement of social media tools, it is a platform on which to build out your promise to your customers.

Business Execution is about delivering on a promise to your customers. Many companies, for example, have a lowest price promise to their customers. They offer to match any price a customer finds elsewhere. But most customers don’t take advantage of this offer. Customers just buy the item somewhere else. Why? Because most companies don’t engage their customers in fulfilling that promise.

Most of you, either first hand or by watching your kids and teens, know the power of engagement that computer and online games have. Smart game developers are taking this engagement know-how and moving it onto social networks like Facebook and converting whole new demographics into online game players. Game companies like Zynga are making serious money doing so while smart marketers, like Gabe Zichermann, are using this engagement know-how to drive customer loyalty and retention.

The best customer loyalty program of all time is the Frequent Flyer program, as Gabe pointed out at his talk “Playing the Loyalty Game” at EngageExpo! in September.  Think of all the hoops most of us jump through to stick with our favorite frequent flyer program. Interestingly, Frequent Flyer programs have the five characteristics of any hugely successful Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG):

• Points
• Leader boards
• Challenges
• Badges and levels
• Rewards

Points, leader boards, challenges, badges and levels and rewards are motivating. “People have fundamental needs and desires – for reward, status, achievement, self-expression, competition, and altruism among others. These needs are universal, and cross generations, demographics, cultures and genders. The big secret is that game mechanics address these needs, and in the process incent, motivate and engage your users.” writes Gabe in “The Engaging Web – How Fun and Games Improve Your Site”. Gabe advises all marketers to use the MMOG basic design philosophy to drive user behavior and create customer loyalty that is “passionately irrational with predictability”.

Smart companies engage their customers. They reward you for returning to the store and allowing them to match the lower price you found somewhere else. They want you to help them fulfill their promise to you.  Southwest Airline’s promise is “the low cost airline.” One of the ways they keep this promise is fast turn-arounds – less time on the ground keeps overall costs down. Southwest airlines could create a game with rewarding points, challenges and badges for getting to the gate early. This would encourage you to help them do a fast turnaround and so keep costs down. Would leaderboards of on-time passengers be more effective than the punishment of last to board? I think so.

What game dynamics would make your customers “passionately irrational with predictability” – think about it. And think about getting Gabe’s new book – Game-Based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges, and Contests.

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 3^rd 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.

Additional sources:

BestBuy: A Social Media Case Study

Company as Wiki

Earlier this week, in “Cooking up Social Media with the Right Ingredients”, I wrote about Walmart and how their Elevenmoms initiative created and leveraged a community of shared values around saving money.

Today I will walk you through what Gina Debogovich, Best Buy’s Community Manager, called “a journey of all the wonderful things we can accomplish through social media.”  Gina and Jason Parker, Community Analyst, shared their story at last week’s Engage!Expo.

About two years ago, Best Buy’s Enterprise Customer Care Division realized conversations were taking place on social media about Best Buy brands, and Best Buy needed to act.

First they observed and listened. They responded privately to customer comments in the blogosphere, but that didn’t create much traction. They decide to take it up a notch.  They reached out to the appropriate internal departments like PR, HR, legal, Corporate Communications, etc.  Once everyone was on board and privacy concerns were talked through, Gina was out there as Gina-BBY:  a blogger, on twitter, and connecting with customers in the blog sphere and social media.

Early successes allowed her to hire a team and start participating more actively. Gina’s goals were to decrease support costs and increase customer spending, loyalty and product insights. In one example she shared, a customer posting on social media complained about the lack of iPhone inventory in a Miami area store. They quickly discovered the root cause (bulk buyers shipping overseas) and were able to rectify it within two weeks.  Gina credited the “remarkable speed and power of online community.”

Remarkable speed and power is also a great way to describe how Best Buy has embraced social media.  Three blogs, a Community Forum, bi-weekly videos each highlighting a policy or product, and an idea exchange called IDEAx. Marketing joined the party and the INSIGNIA brand launched their own community and Best Buy recently launched Twelpforce – 1,800 customer service employees on Twitter answering customers questions in three languages.

Gina says brands have to become social and listen to customers. Her advice is to get ahead of the curve, join the conversation and monitor the brand. If you get out there and build credibility you can respond to negative issues effectively.

Best Buy is also known for its data mining and analytics prowess and they’ve applied these smarts to social media. What are they learning? 85% of interactions are peer-to-peer, including resolving issues and getting buying advice. From a customer service perspective, 50% of interactions are service related and 50% are about product insight.

And the results? Best Buy sees improved first contact resolution while deeper customer loyalty, more interactions and more visits correlate to more transactions.

Next up: how Best Buy’s execution culture made this great story possible.

Meri’s recipe for success:

• Take corporate touchstone.
• Distill simple and clear corporate values.
• Combine with matching tools and processes.
• Stir continuously.
• Serve up to every customer, every time.
• Keep fresh.

The crux of Business Execution is that companies with a clear set of values outperform if these values are explicit and actionable.  An era of customer engagement and expanding social networking means you must externalize your values beyond your organization.  You need to put your values to work in the social networks and communities that matter to you and your customers.

Walmart and BestBuy are succeeding by externalizing their values in social media.  First Walmart.

“Walmart is all about saving money, so it was easy to find people who were passionate about saving money,”  said John Andrews of Collective Bias and formerly Emerging Media Manager Walmart, speaking at Engage!Expo last week. Walmart built  “communities of people passionate about the same value.”

Walmart started by listening and learning.  In their own words:  “We began slowly, making contacts in Twitter, leveraging Facebook profiles, viewing related YouTube videos, and trying to understand how we could participate. And not just by adding more messaging.  We made friends.  We heard from our critics.  And we began to interact as both Walmart associates and as people.”

After listening and learning, Walmart reached out to 11 mom bloggers and asked them to join a connected community about saving money. The group, naturally called Elevenmoms, has grown into what John called “an integrated social platform actively involved in brand decisions.”

John shared these words of wisdom for companies defining their social media strategy.  “The Big Thing is to be an evangelist and bring the entire organization into the process.  Social media is not owned by marketing or corporate communications.  Zappos has it right – every person in your company is part of your social media platform.”

And what better way to tee up my next blog post on Best Buy’s social media strategy with 1800 customer service employees on Twitter.