My head has thoughts to share during my return from Appliance Summit in Boston. This was a gathering of Best Buy store supervisors who won an internal contest based on customer experience performance. The event began with a vendor show and included other more festive activities that are suitable for contest winners prepared to celebrate victory.

I attended the event as an internal vendor at the show representing Best Buy's internal social-network, BlueShirt Nation (BSN), and the new BSN Bazaar which gives a secure space for Best Buy employees to connect directly with key vendors without allowing those vendors access to the employee-to-employee discussions on BSN.

Bazaar is in the early stages of a pilot program. The vendors involved volunteered to be first-in with the understanding that they were stepping into an unpolished site with testing and proving value as a the mission.

My purpose for attending the Appliance Summit was to spread the word about Bazaar to these attending supervisors. I was looking for their initial reactions, their comments and hopefully enough enthusiasm to motivate them into a first Bazaar visit upon returning home. Ultimately, I am hoping for their endorsement of the site to their in-store colleagues. BSN proved that word-of-mouth is a great way to build a healthy enterprise social network.

My biggest take-away was both motivating and frustrating. It was that the vast majority of Best Buy employees are still not familiar with BSN. For them, they were learning of BSN and Bazaar for the first time even though BSN has existed for more than 2 years. It was not a surprise though. During a string of store visits last month in Minneapolis and St. Paul, I found this same situation. Connecting with a cross section of supervisors from across the country confirmed BSN's lack of penetration.

The reactions, comments and questions I absorbed from the attendees were tremendously encouraging. For most attendees, I had about 90 seconds to tell them why I was there, explain both BSN and Bazaar and then dole out the schwag. I heard:

“WOW. I am so glad I stopped by here.”

“This is so cool.”

“You mean I don't have to wait on-hold with these vendors for 20 minutes to get my question answered?”

“You mean I don't have to wait for 3 months before our vendor representative makes a store visit?”

“Can I sign up right now?” (The answer here was, “Hell yeah.”)

“Do you have any t-shirts left?” (Some people are all about the schwag.)

I heard genuine enthusiasm. It affirmed to me that Bazaar can have enormous value as more users contribute to more vendors making more posts. (Please feel free to read about my Chicken or the Egg Dilemma which continues.)

I fielded some awesome suggestions too. Melissa from Boston suggested that each store break room should have a kiosk locked on BlueShirt Nation and Bazaar. Can someone find me the budget or just 1,000 functioning but retiring computers I can use for this one? Tony from In-Home Services wants to use Bazaar as the new path for his technicians to ask the questions they need answered for their repairs. He has already emailed his crew letting them know.

I was also thinking that there should be a window on the front of every vendor's room in the site that shows the names/UserID of all the vendor members.

I did not spend much time speaking to vendors while at the show. One vendor did approach me. I did not catch his title but it was clear that he was in a leadership role at one of Best Buy's VERY key vendors. He wanted to understand BSN and Bazaar as he had heard about the sites from some of his field personnel who call on stores, buyers or both. He seemed almost miffed as his words were, “Help me understand why [my company] has been excluded from the space.”

He walked away feeling much better as I explained our pilot program approach and opened the door for him to get in the queue for joining in. He also seemed tremendously intrigued by BSN and said, “We need something like that.”

He's got my card. His would be an intense project.