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Best Buy: A social media case study

by Robin Grant in News on 28 May 2009 at 17:10

Amongst the famous examples of Dell, Ford, Zappos, Skype and the like, Best Buy may not be the first company that comes to mind when thinking about which companies using are using social media well.

They’re also not the sort of company you would immediately assume would be ahead of the curve in terms of social media – they’re  the world’s largest multi-channel home electronics retailer (similar to  Currys or  Comet in the UK) who have recently made moves into Europe with the acquisition of 50% of Carphone Warehouse’s European stores (and with rumours they may go further than that).

However, in reality they’re as advanced as any of the examples I give above – let’s start with a short introduction from Best Buy’s Chief Marketing Officer, Barry Judge:

And then move onto this presentation from Gina Debogovich, Best Buy’s Community Manager:

It’s also worth finding out more about Best Buy Connect, Blue Shirt Nation (a community for Best Buy Employees), how they use customer reviews, their recently launched API and looking at how they use their own forums and Get Satisfaction to support their customers.

Let’s finish with a 4 minute video

looking at Best Buy’s internal use of social media followed by a 20 minute interview with Best Buy’s CEO Brad Anderson talking about the issues in detail:

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Nissan has launched a marketing campaign for its Cube that incorporates Cube-themed iPhone apps, games, videos and ringtones to prove just how hip it is to be square.

The Cube Mobile Hub site gives Cube owners and enthusiasts the chance to bond over a car that Nissan says is designed for interacting, all while disengaged from the real world, poking away at a tiny cellphone screen.

It’s yet another example of automakers using social networking to sell their cars, and it comes on the heels of similar campaigns by Ford and Honda. Honda recently launched a microsite where people can virtually drive the new Insight and learn more about the dirt-cheap hybrid.

Nissan is hoping that the mobile site will convince potential buyers that the slab-sided subcompact is just as essential to the mobile lifestyle as text messages, Twitter and Facebook. “We envision owners using their Cubes as one of their essential mobile devices, connecting with friends, sharing music and sharing fun,” Nissan marketing exec Christian Meunier said in a statement.

Nissan says the Cube features a “socially oriented lounge-style interior.” At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, we think it might be a perfect place for five friends to text each other.

We visited the site Mobile Hub and everyone seems to be having a lot more fun than we are. Our favorite feature might be the forthcoming iPhone App called “Cube Party Roundup.” The objective of the game is to gain points doing things that we thought only happened in commercials for cars and liquor: Drive around a city picking up friends, dates, and “ice, music and other items,” all in preparation for a big party.

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I’m going to try this tonight – Wednesdays, BBC One, 9pm – In light of recent interviews with Antony Rose who is responsible for the iPlayer and the industry news that Adobe Flash is coming to TVs and set top boxes it seems inevitable that this kind of value added service is going to end up on the TV rather than the laptop.

It all depends on the UI though. It may just be easier to keep the 2 seperate unless TV remote controls turn into mobile handsets…or vice versa…

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Here’s how Linqia works.

If you have social networks on one hand and potential commercial partners on the other, Linqia is design to be a marketplace where the two can meet for sponsor partnerships or whatever. One of the partners it’s been working with has been Nike which has a new shoe for golfers. It needed to reach social networks, so Linqia worked with its agency on a test run of how to promote the shoes inside its test-bed of social networks. In real time the agency could see the response in the networks and just pay for results.

Linquia’s business model is that it gets a revenue share on the deal.

In December it launches its technology to enable the real-time transactions between commercial entities and networks, but for now it’s on a recruiting drive to fill out its marketplace of social networks.

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Users can sign into the site using their Facebook username and password and leave comments on the posts that have been written.

A pop up then appears asking whether you’d like your actions to be broadcast on to Facebook’s newsfeed as a one liner, a short or a full description or not to broadcast it at all. This is then submitted to your newsfeed on Facebook and your Redbull USA activity is broadcast to all your Facebook friends.

It’s early days, but the lure and seamlessness for brands seems too great for this not to be taken up by others.

For brands who’ve been invested and experimenting on Facebook via Pages, this feels like the natural next step. It will be interesting to see what other brands do.

Flip.com was launched in February 2007. Today Conde Nast, which owns flip.com, announced that it was reversing its strategy saying that Flip will be “reshaped as a flexible web application designed to live on social networking platform, starting with Facebook.”

Translation: “We give up.”

From the above you can see that at its peak flip.com was getting over 400,000 monthly users, so what happened?

I think there are a number of reasons:

1. The campaign money ran out – social communities need to keep going far longer than your average campaign timeframe otherwise the time invested by your audience will turn from advocacy to distrust.
2. There weren’t enough clearly defined success criteria to guage whether more investment should be made in maintaining it.
3. The ‘niche’ they were going for (teenage girls) wasn’t niche enough. It was too big a market segment to succeed.
4. Flip.com was born out of a print culture – they couldn’t conceive of simply building an application – which is what they’ve ended up with, so they created alot of editorial that people didn’t read or interact with.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens…

more

Google’s OpenSocial API is just a common Google-sponsored widget format for mini-applications. One which Google owns the control on. Sure, anyone can write an app using OpenSocial, but anyone can write an app on Facebook too. It looks just as proprietary as the Facebook system it more or less copies.

What’s crucially missing from this solution is openness – What OpenSocial offers is a way in which any application can be wrapped in a container API. That container API is tweaked and made to fit with each of the different social networking solutions out there. This means that the code in the app doesn’t need to change; if the app needs a list of my friends it just calls:

container.getFriends().

If my app sits on my Hi5 page it will get those friends one way and if I have the app on my MySpace page it’ll get my friends another way. The app itself doesn’t care how that happens – that’s the Container API’s job.

The Container API has not been mentioned, it’s the elephant in the room. With access to it I could create a social network on my blog…or Nike could sign up to it and ensure that already popular social apps could fit into their site furniture on their domain, rather than having to fit into another social network’s furniture e.g. Sponsored pages on MySpace. Powerful eh? You can appreciate why it hasn’t been mentioned given the speed at which they’ve released OpenSocial this is clearly an aspect of the API which needs a little more thought and consensus.

It’s the 1st question to ask when considering a brand such as Nike and whether they’d want to sign up to OpenSocial in the future, and that’s the most exciting thing about Google’s announcement of OpenSocial – It stops us from chasing functionality and concentrating on the basics, WHATEVER the social network happens to be.

The conversation is finally moving towards the root of social networking, and I’m all for that.

Cartoon illustrating the features of flying Virgin Airlines.
Virgin Americans Flickr gallery

A blog review from David Winer.
Another blog review.
BoingBoing review

All 3 are powerful word-of-mouth recommendations.

BoingBoing have signed an exclusive deal to supply Virgin Airlines with their BoingBoing.tv content. Nice fit.

All good stuff and does what it set out to. Domestic air travel in the US is now in a huge fare war as a result.

This has been a really well executed digital PR strategy from Virgin America.

Also similar in strategy is O2 Cocoon’s blog – Very interesting to see where O2 chose to install the blog – within O2 Blueroom and on its own domain – rather than on the o2.co.uk domain. This way I guess they enable the bloggers and guest writers the ability to write opinionated reviews and comments which spark conversation rather than just decimating other news in a bland way. Talk radio DJs are opinionated on purpose in order to get people to pick up the phone, the same is true online.

What will be interesting to see will be the way in which O2 Cocoon’s blog sows ‘seeds of conversation’ that dovetail in with other campaign activity over the coming months. It’s also a little surprising that there’s no Facebook group, sponsored or otherwise, which would drive people to the blog.

Update: O2 now have a Facebook group, either I missed it (very likely given the numbers it’s generated!) or it’s one of the fastest growing groups on Facebook! Love the scoreboard.