Best Buy’s Connect is definitely an excellent example of transparency. I commend Best Buy for taking the big step and letting go of all that control over their public image.

However, after visiting BB Connect I think I have to agree with some of the other comments made here. While inviting the public to tap into the lives of Best Buy employees is a good way to “humanize” their brand, it’s pretty much filled with useless tweets and blogs that don’t really shed light on what its like to be apart of the Best Buy corporate culture. For example, one person left the tweet: “lettuce and tomato, get!” Connect is a great internal communications tool, but is it really of interest to anyone else?

As Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff write in their book Groundswell, companies need to focus on “the relationships, not the technologies.” So my question is: by aggregating a bunch of social media technologies what is the outcome for Best Buy’s relationships with their various audiences? Will potential customers now prefer the Best Buy brand to Future shop because they can read employee tweets? I think not.

It’s simply a glimpse into the social stream of active Best Buy employees within social media sites.

I’m sure BB would love to see some suggestions on how they could better structure and design their social media aggregation effort. I for one, agree, it could be a lot better. I also think if this kind of effort is going anywhere, Best Buy will put some resources in to it – monitoring, testing and measurement to refine and make it better.

Otherwise, it will be a waste of time and go unnoticed.

Media references to the car makers discussions with Government have frequently been characterized as “asking for money”.

Asking for a line of credit is asking for money, albeit in the future rather than in the short term. No amount of social media PR spin or semantics changes that.

Scott Monty
Global Digital Communications
Ford Motor Company

We’ll see how they grow from here.

Yes, companies and marketers are just now figuring it out.

This is a test to see if they are monitoring their reputation and listening, which are key components in social media. We know Top Rank Blog ranks. We’ll see if they respond, get involved in the conversation and incorporate some of the suggested improvements.

It’s an unorganized pile of nothing and a very poor attempt at social media.

I’ve always thought Best Buy’s problem with social media is that they can’t seem to grab a focus. Their YouTube page is filled with tons of video, all poorly organized and with no real direction for the customer or viewer. What should I be looking at? If I’m a customer or potential employee, what should I look at? It’s basic web design.

Aggregation is good, but even aggregation needs a focus. I have no intention of checking BB Connect every day to see that their employees talk about random things; my Twitter feed already has plenty of that, thank you.

I also don’t want to check BB Connect every day to see dozens of videos about Best Buy that are unorganized and that I have no interest in until someone tells me why I should care.

Sure, I might like to see if Best Buy employees have some recommendations on movies to buy this week or top gadgets of Q1, but I see none of this (yet they said that is what should be there). Some actual CONTENT, and not mindless banter or PR bragging videos, would make this page actually useful. As a customer or a potential employee, you need to do some branding here; focus the content on your specialty (tech) and build alignment and linkage around that.

Mindless, unorganized, uninteresting and unfocused aggregation is not social media.

A note about Best Buy Connect’s SEO:
They could improve their efforts by applying some very basic SEO principles. Their TITLE tag reads, “Categories | Best Buy Inc.” They didn’t include any other meta information for the search snippets.

Small details like this, especially the TITLE tag, can stop users from bookmarking this page and checking back later.

During my conversations with business owners and salespeople over 35, their typical responses are “I don’t have time for that” or “I’m too old for that”.

Heck, I’m older and see the benefits.