Twelp Is On The Way! by Brandon Mendelson
Below is a post by Brandon Mendelson on his blog, Soap Box Included. I thought it was a good examination of the pros and cons of going national vs local with Twelpforce. We’re thinking a lot about where Twelpforce goes next and this was helpful for me.
Twelp Is On The Way!
A running joke with Earth’s Temporary Solution is that we exist at Best Buy’s whim.
Many folks who work with us are either current or former Best Buy employees. I think it has something do with the blue shirts and air of superiority one gets when working for the Geek Squad.
Many members of our audience are also Best Buy employees, so when an employee writes in with a question about big corporate blue, I listen:
I work for Best Buy and I’m a little puzzled about how they have tried to embrace Twitter. You may have seen their “Twelpforce” commercials where people can ask @twelpforce a technology question and the collective Best Buy intelligence will answer them. When I heard Best Buy would be joining the Twitterverse I assumed they would set up accounts for each store individually. Then you could still have corporately mandated tweets but also let the employees at that particular location create a connection with the customers in the area.
All that to ask… As some one who pretty much lives on social networking, what are your thoughts on this. Did they make a good choice or should they have gone a more personal route? Or should they have just stayed out of Twitter?
Stephen
@stephenphillips
Initial Thoughts
At this point, you have to be on Twitter. But I was disappointed to not see a localized approach because that’s where Twitter is going.
Think about it: Let’s say you live in Wilton, New York. Since Twitter is now recording where a tweet comes from, API developers could create a script or program to match keywords and locations, and have them ping a local store when there is a relevant match.
If you tweet: “I just melted my Wii into ashes and am walking around with its remains”, your local Best Buy could see that tweet and reply, “We’re having a special on new Wiis this weekend if you want a replacement”
OR my favorite: Personalized offers. “We see you’re in need of a new game system, if you come to the store, we can give you a deal on a new XBox 360.”
But.
A giant Borg-like collective to answer your questions? Madness. Unorganized, slow, frightning, sticky, madness.
Keep in mind, this opinion was formed based on reading several Best Buy case studies and working toward a Master’s in Organizational Leadership. That didn’t work out too well.
Maybe I was wrong? I decided to test things out …
Testing Twelpforce: It’s Awesome!
The experiment started simple enough. Amanda recently purchased her laptop from the Wilton Best Buy. Allegedly, she was eligible to receive a free Windows 7 upgrade when it is released in October. Not wanting to call the store and sound like an idiot, I gave Twelpforce a try.
In less than an hour, I received two responses from two Twelpforce agents with accurate information and a URL with further details about the upgrade program.
Not bad.
They also have a sense of humor:
Straight From Twelpforce’s Manager, John Bernier
I can’t effectively answer why Best Buy went with Twelpforce instead of local store based feeds, but John Bernier, who works at Best Buy and heads up the Twelpforce, can.
On how Twelpforce came about (emphasis added)
Twelpforce was essentially a culmination of over a year’s worth of experimentation with twitter as a communications platform. Our first real steps were to collect and organize all of the employees who were active in the medium, and give them a way to share their updates on behalf of Best Buy using the Connecttweet application, developed internally by Ben Hedrington, one of our BBY.com engineers. We simply presented these employees with the option(through word of mouth) to tweet on behalf of Best Buy, shared with them some public guidelines we put together, and tried it out.
After this experiment proved to work, collectively, we realized how powerful a tool like this could be if we created a way for our employees to talk with, and not to, customers to share our knowledge freely. To let customers tap into the brains of our employees, so to speak. While there was no one moment, the idea was there, and essentially Twelpforce was born, it just needed a name.
On how the collective works (emphasis added)
Twelpforce is set up is that it allows ANY employee from anywhere in the country to not only contribute to a wide variety of questions at any given time, but it also allows those users to build a local following as well. One of our stated goals of this initiative was to accelerate the adoption of social media amongst our employees, and in 12 months, we imagine that the majority of tweets by employees may be to their local followers, with the minority of those tweets going to @twelpforce. There will still be many questions that come in, but the key difference is that we’re reserving @twelpforce as the knowledge center, and will not be using it to share local-based info, like seminars, product sale info, etc…we’re counting on our employees to leverage their local feeds to do that kind of tweeting. The Twelpforce initiative just helps them get involved with it so they can acquire this information on their own, or through peer-to-peer sharing of best practices.
Final Analysis
My brain locks up trying to process how ingenious this is.
As cool as having a borg-like collective is, one of the goals is to help strengthren the presence of the Best Buy employees and allow them to build up a following where they can chat with, inform, and more importantly, help people that are following them.
And since it’s all under the Best Buy banner, it’s the ultimate self-sustaining word-of-mouth generator for Best Buy.
Now, I want to be clear: Every brand should take a page out of the Scott Monty Play Book. If you’re looking for just about anything concerning Ford, you go to Scott and he’ll steer you in the right place.
This is extremley useful for Ford because Scott humanizes a very large company that hasn’t always had the best reputation, makes them approachable, and you feel good when he answers your questions.
But, I think if I were a brand playing around with social publishing, I’d push them to take a long, hard look at Twelpforce. Because:
1) No one else is doing this (it’s book worthy people, and I gurantee you someone will try to duplicate Twelpforce, and / or write a book about its success within a year.)
2) This is a very large company, using tremendous resources, to empower 1,300 Best Buy employees on a single social network.
Those 1,3000 (and eventual 2,500 which is their goal for the year) could mean millions more in sales for the company and make the difference between going to Wal-Mart or Target instead of going to Best Buy.
The 1,300 are diference makers and influencers, and we’re not too far from having these folks become their own micro-rock stars with the ability to influence the performance of an individual store.
That’s right. @edthomas could wield more influence over the store he works for in terms of sales than television commercials.
Now imagine 1,300 Eds doing the same for their store.
Changes the game, doesn’t it?
