Some would say that the best insights, innovations, and conversations from within enterprise social networks occur when the hierarchy is flattened, eliminated or at least masked in some way and users can be anonymous. When the leaders trust and empower their people enough to police themselves – frank comments often possess the highest value even if they have an edge. Often times, the rough edge of a comment is a symptom of real passion.

BlueShirt Nation (BSN), the internal social network for Best Buy employees, has created that atmosphere. Employees know that they can speak candidly. BSN is user-driven for both content and the structure of the site. It's their space.

Clearly, BSN has been highly decorated and mentioned repeatedly in the blogosphere as a benchmark for how enterprise social networks should perform. BSN Founders, Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling, would say that the site is a fluke. If that is not true, it surely is a product of a perfect storm that mixed tolerant enterprise leadership, patient and open-minded founders, a prime target demographic (most Best Buy employees are in their late teens and early twenties) and several other factors.

However, all is not perfect with BSN. It's nice to level out the hierarchy but, as a rule, company leaders are not in the prime social networking demographic. The company leaders that visit BSN do so infrequently. Age is not the only factor in my estimation. It is likely that the nature of their jobs keeps them away from a computer screen for much of the day. They are tethered to the virtual world by some kind of mobile device and rely on it for much of the day.

This concludes the “why” of BSN Mix. BSN Mix is an integration of BlueShirt Nation with Headmix – a start-up offering a mashup of email, SMS and Twitter-like functionality that will allow our leaders to weave important conversations into the tiny snippets of downtime they see in their schedules. It also could serve to add a new level of convenience for the BlueShirts who typically would visit BSN on break times or while away from their store. It will allow for quick answers to questions no matter if they come from a board room at the corporate campus or from the sales floor in Tulsa, OK. This integration has been a key focus of my work during the past few months. We are nearly ready to launch.

Some great stuff has already been written about BSN Mix that you can find here*, here and here.

We have had almost zero conversation about Mix outside of the development group. When the article by Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) came out this week (linked above*), word traveled inside Best Buy Corporate.  A couple of departments have already raised their hands anxious to test/sample Mix. You just can't beat having an environment where people want to try and are OK with “fail” as long as something is learned.

The intent for Mix is that it will serve to provide a more convenient way to connect leaders to each other – people who spend little time in front of a computer screen. We hope to learn that Mix also makes sense as a more convenient means for employees to connect with employees.

With SMS charges as an obstacle staring me in the face, I have this nifty fantasy about how a BlueShirt in a store can text a customer question via BSN Mix that broadcasts to several dozen people in her category. She gets an instant response from one person so that the customer receives a fast, knowledgeable answer. The BSN Mix road map will eventually integrate content more completely so that that public Mix posts can be seen as a feed for all BSN online users .

As a part of the initial integration, it was imperative to us that the users be allowed to maintain their anonymity if they wish. As stated, that anonymity breeds candor and the glimpses of true passion for seeing improvements in customer experience and for the way we work. Getting company leadership more involved could serve to accelerate ideas into actionable innovation.