Welcome to Blue Shirt Nation

The manifesto’s three main goals are broad ones: “Be believable,” “Bring people together,” and “Try things.” Employees should ask questions and share what they know, make mistakes and then admit them. Sharing can be the most effective path to a solution. The goal is building something better together than managers or employees could on their own. And everyone should be willing to experiment and learn from mistakes.

According to Albert Maruggi, founder of Provident Partners, a St. Paul–based social media and public relations consulting firm, the concepts developed from social networking are actually as old-fashioned as Mr. Rogers and James Madison.

“Mr. Rogers told us everyone is special, and James Madison was the architect of freedom of speech,” Maruggi says. “When you combine those two things and then provide an easy venue . . . you have blogs, you have comments, you have YouTube questions in the presidential debates.”

Last September, when Barry Judge, Best Buy’s chief marketing officer, suggested using Twitter as a new way to communicate with customers, one Best Buy board member asked Judge if he’d just made the word up. (Judge later wrote about the exchange in his Best Buy blog.) Twitter is a microblogging platform that lets users share messages of 140 characters or fewer on either their mobile phone or computer. Judge admitted he only discovered the service himself about 45 days before the September board meeting where he brought up the idea. By the end of the calendar year, 2,893 Twitter users had subscribed to Judge’s “tweets,” as Twitter posts are called.

Judge is the most senior person at Best Buy to dive head first into social networking. Since late last summer, he’s been using a variety of tools, including Twitter, YouTube, and an old-fashioned blog, in an attempt to foster open dialogue with Best Buy customers.

“For people that work with me, you know that we strongly believe that our brand has to become more trusted,” Judge wrote in an October blog post. “This can mean a lot of things, but for me it starts with being open and transparent. I feel like there is no better way for me personally to reinforce that behavior than participating in activities like Twitter and blogging that, when done well, enable me to live the brand ideals.”

The messages vary from marketing philosophy to quips about the Timberwolves to impressions of new tech gizmos he’s trying out. But most of Judge’s tweets are responses to other Twitter users.

Besides just responding to customer questions and comments, Judge is using social networking to solicit feedback on projects. In November, Judge posted several rough cuts from an upcoming ad campaign on YouTube and asked his followers to share their thoughts on the commercials.