Twitter: May the Twelpforce be With You

Consumer electronics are nor always the easiest thing for the everyday consumer to deal with: systems crash, wires don’t connect, directions don’t make sense, acronyms are confusing and there are 1,001 things that can possibly go wrong. So when you’re a consumer-electronics behemoth like Best Buy, you can have a lot of confused customers calling up or appearing on your doorstep looking for information on products they’ve already purchased or they are considering.

Well, Best Buy has 180,000 employees — many with reams of knowledge about their products. And it has forward-looking executives who realize that the world of one-way communication from the company to the consumer is dying and the more a company can encourage conversation with its consumers, the better.

Thus the birth of Twelpforce, a Twitter feed that more than 2,000 Best Buy employees tweet to in order to respond to consumer needs. Twelpforce has more than 34,000 followers who are looking for information about their mobile phones, bottom-freezer refrigerators, their DVD players, their 50” flat-screen TVs with satellite speakers (and a little popcorn popper, to boot). Those followers can expect Twelpforce to respond to their queries on any consumer-electronic products quickly and likely accurately. Sure beats sitting on hold on the telephone.

Meanwhile, Best Buy itself has more than 81,000 Twitter followers and the Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge has more than 15,000 followers on the Best Buy CMO feed, too. Plus, he’s got a blog (barryjudge.com) so he can talk all he wants about traveling or sports and interested parties can tune in.

The company also uses Twitter in-house as well as other social-media forms in order to get information out to its employees and engage them in the process. In a video to show how social media is used in-house, an employee discusses a program in which Best Buy workers can put fake stock into things such as when an upcoming project will finish. When this employee notices that the stock has taken a 20 percent dive that it will finish on time, he or she knows something has happened along the massive employee chain to effect his or her project.

Other internal social-media efforts include forums for whatever is on employee minds and well as a central location for business-related ideas that can be passed directly on to relevant parties.

Facebook Connecting

When Brad Smith, Director, Interactive Marketing & Emerging Media from Best Buy spoke at a session devoted to Social Media Best Practices earlier this year, he noted that customers are learning how to eliminate marketing message from their media diet and are looking for ways to listen to one another more, according to TopRankBlog.

“I don’t use Facebook, I participate,” Smith said. “It’s a two-way thing. You’re not halfway into social media. When you’re in you’re in.”

He went on to say that Best Buy isn’t interested anymore in dictating messages to consumers but in trying to engage them more fully. “It’s not about what Best Buy wants customers to do,” he said. “It’s about giving people the tools to connect with each other and employees whenever and however they want.”

When the company first kicked off its Facebook page, it tried to push certain commercial messages and products, but Smith noted that the consumers told the company that it didn’t want such aggressiveness on Facebook and instead wanted tips, “access to the brand,” and “exclusive access.”

One way Best Buy facilitates such things on Facebook is with a Shop+Share section that encourages users to ask other users to comment on products that are being considered for purchase. It also has a My Store tab that allows users to dig up all the needed info on their local Best Buy.

Meanwhile, bestbuy.com serves as the backbone to the company’s digital-marketing efforts. It offers products for purchase online as well as the services of its traveling Geek Squad, which also has its own branded site. Other services highlighted are how to recycle consumer electronics, service plans, and trade-ins.

In the Gifts section accessible from its top navigation, the site enables consumers to create wish lists as well as to purchase gift cards with various designs based on different occasions. So if you’re looking for a gift to give on Three Kings Day, Best Buy has a gift card all ready for you.

Another kind of card available on the site is a Pitch In card, which allows people to give money to you on the site to spend at bestbuy.com when you’ve accrued whatever it is you need to get that honkin’ home theater you’ve wanted since the McNulty’s got one two years ago. The site also finds the space to push its Best Buy credit card and a Best Buy card that also offers rewards when certain amounts of points (i.e. dollar amounts) are reached, such as getting $5 for accruing 250 points.

Other than the online listing of products, the most useful content on the site is likely to be the information that can also be found at bestbuyon.com. It consists of videos and text stories that helps explain products (“How 3D Glasses Work,” etc.) as well as a sign of the store’s musical roots: interviews with such folks as Pete Yorn and Brandon Flowers (the frontman to the Killers).

Its corporate website is currently being transformed, with bby.com now in beta and incorporating more social tools. Its employee social media policy is posted on bby.com, where it’s visible and transparent to all. It also shares competitive information, such as its sales strategy for how it’s promoting “a connected Christmas” and really pushing mobile brands in the fourth quarter.

It hasn’t all been a social media home run, however. A then-innovative employee wiki, Blue Shirt Nation, was discontinued in late 2008 as the company sought other social platforms (cue Twitter and the Twelpforce) to engage its personnel with each other, with customers and the brand.

Online video is also playing a bigger role in how it connects with customers. On YouTube, the company maintains a Best Buy channel, a Geek Squad channel and another for its growing Best Buy UK operation, which just launched in April.

All in all, Best Buy could have just settled back and been a lumbering retail giant but it has embraced digital, particularly on the social-media front, and it is paying off with a high number of engaged consumers.