On any ordinary day, Nick Pfeifer would be pulling a blue Best Buy polo over his head, getting ready to share video game advice with customers at the Colorado Springs store where he works.
This day is different.
Pfeifer wraps a brand new aqua-colored tie around a dress shirt collar. He bought it back home at Wal-Mart, and he learned to tie it just a few days earlier with the help of a video he found on YouTube.
He chose the tie because the color matches the three-ring binder sitting in his luggage. Pfeifer will present the document later that day at Best Buy headquarters in Richfield during a half-hour one-on-one with Brian Dunn, the company’s chief operating officer.
The binder contains what Pfeifer considers a “21st century” vision for how Best Buy could sell video games. The proposal was inspired by his experience as a video gamer and an eight-year Best Buy sales associate.
So how did this 24-year-old from Colorado Springs manage to network his way to a meeting last September with a C-level manager of the world’s largest consumer electronics retailer?
It wouldn’t have happened a few short years ago. But now, Best Buy executives are listening to Pfeifer’s ideas, thanks to an employees-only social network called Blue Shirt Nation. The company launched the Blue Shirt Nation site in 2006, just as sites like Facebook and MySpace were gaining attention.
The lessons learned from Blue Shirt Nation are starting to be touted by some in the company as a model for how the retailer could radically change the way it communicates with not only employees but also consumers.
The approach basically boils down to empowering employees to be as open, honest, and inclusive as possible in their online and real-world interactions. By doing so, the theory goes, Best Buy will gain trust, loyalty, and the ability to tap the ocean of expertise held by its tens of thousands of young, tech-smart employees and its customers. It could also find out how to better sell its products, an increasing challenge during a recession.
From Clipboard to Cutting Edge
Blue Shirt Nation started as a quest for a different kind of information. In 2006, Gary Koelling, then a creative director at Best Buy, and Steve Bendt, an account supervisor, felt distant from their customers. Up until that point, Best Buy learned about its customers’ needs using the usual tools: surveys, complaints, focus groups. But Koelling and Bendt wanted deeper insights about customer wants in order to create more effective advertising.
