In follow-up to a previous post, The Cost of Doing Nothing, companies should consider the rewards for doing something with regard to social media and social technology.

In today's business, companies feel compelled to survey, test, survey and retest before delving into any new product or process. Companies perform due diligence on every front before trying. Trying blindly is scary. Trying without the ability to mimic the success of predecessors or previous experience is too risky for the principals and the stock holders.

Social media for enterprise is still relatively uncharted territory. Companies who are building internal social networks, or who are trying to leverage social media sites for business marketing are doing so with very few models for success. The companies who have made attempts have seen failures. The really smart ones have turned those failures into a learning experience that motivates another try. The first “try” is difficult. The “try again” can be even more scary especially when leadership chose to allocate a substantial budget to an outside vendor for failed result during the first attempt.

Best Buy (BBY) has shown that trying and failing are two key ingredients for making social technology work for the organization. Other key ingredients, in my opinion, include great listening, trust, leadership engagement, leadership patience and a bit of risk tolerance. A truck full of cash is not required. In fact, it isn't even recommended. Trying can happen on the cheap. More cash does not equal faster success. In fact, more cash can lead to a more paralyzing fail.

This recipe was learned (partially by failure and partially by accident) by Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling, creators of BlueShirt Nation, Giftag.com and other social sites operating inside of Best Buy.

My projects at Best Buy have been an exercise in “trying.”

BlueShirt Nation(BSN) Bazaar is an experiment to see if we could create a valuable exchange between employees and Best Buy vendors. Can we create a space that brings a meaningful exchange of information through conversation? The budget used to get six months of learning is minuscule. Granted, I have the benefit of knowing what Gary and Steve learned during the creation of BlueShirt Nation. It helped steer the BSN Bazaar development and the site marketing.

What has come from BSN Bazaar is proof that employees welcome the opportunity to have an unmoderated connection with vendors. BBY employees are engaging with vendor representatives about products, process and competitive comparisons. The employees are getting an asynchronous connection with vendor representatives that can answer technical questions, answer sales questions and address product development comments. Vendors are benefiting from first-hand accounts of employee perspective and second-hand accounts that cover customer perspective. Normally, they would rely on information from buyers and expensive focus-groups. Most importantly, this exchange is coming on the back of relationship building and in a transparent environment based on trust.  (You read more about my work on Bazaar here.)

I used to work for Grainger Industrial Supply. Grainger vendors would spend substantial dollars to participate in a vendor show at the annual sales meetings. Interactions with each of those vendors might last as long as four minutes. Four minutes, once each year. I suspect those vendors would gladly support a platform that gives them the ability to have discussion with employees year round. Grainger's engaged employees would benefit from an easy path to reach their vendors with questions, comments and critique.

The real benefit to a company who embraces social media is a new found trust. Enterprise social media begins to feel successful when the internal participants are given trust by leadership, legal and HR to act on their best judgment and to be themselves. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, uses these words to his employees about their use of Twitter, “just be real and use your best judgment.” How many CEO's of billion dollar companies put this much trust in the hands of their employees? Not many, today. The world is changing.

There is an entire age group growing up right now in a world where the internet is THE place for information. They trust information from people they know before trusting information from big corporations and media entities. They do not consume messages pushed out via traditional channels. They use their DVR/Tivo, they get commercial-free music from Pandora, and a newspaper is a tool for getting streak-free windows – too bad they don't subscribe. Gen Y'ers and younger expect social technology to be an available tool inside their organization for collaboration. Companies that are missing these tools are telling new hires that they are behind the times.

The next experiment at BBY is just beginning. I have been working on an integration of BSN with a SaaS (software as a service) called Headmix. The integration will be called BSN Mix. Headmix functionality is much like Twitter but with the ability to follow individuals and/or groups/topics. Ultimately, we believe Mix could reduce the email load, increase employee knowledge and connect more people in an efficient way to improve their effectiveness. In addition, integrating BSN with Headmix allows for a security check to limit users to current employees only.  (You can read more about BSN Mix here.)

Once again, experimentation has begun with the bare minimum of funding. The opportunity to learn is at hand. Risk is minimal.

BSN Mix and BSN Bazaar:

Number of formal surveys conducted before building the sites: 0

Number of outside examples viewed before building the sites: 0

BSN user feedback and informal questions posed to users were all that this group needed to take a chance. It seemed like a good idea. Users thought it might be a good idea. So we built the sites.

Users and vendors seem very engaged on Bazaar. The community is slowly growing.

When BSN was first launched in June of 2006 it was done for the cost a domain name and of Gary Koelling's time in his basement in front of his own computer. He did not conduct formal surveys first. He did not have other enterprise social networks to mimic. He had an idea. He built it with Steve Bendt. It sucked. They asked the users why it sucked. They listened. They tried again – and again. Two and a half years later, it could be argued that BlueShirt Nation is one of the most well-known enterprise social networks in the country – proof that this kind of internal community is possible and powerful.

In retrospect, a company that wants more instant gratification could go to a social media “supplier” to build the whole thing. The benefit to that approach is that the company can write a check and sit back to await results. The drawback is that as soon as the company sits back to await results that the effort will fail. A fail without learning.  That check might be a big one. Unfortunately, a big check does not help to evolve employee culture. In reality, internal engagement at all levels is needed to make it a real success.

The jury is still out on BSN Mix. The integration with BSN is through the first stage – enough so that it can only be accessed by authenticated users. Right now we are working on changes to the user interface to make the site more intuitive. Patience and time will determine if employees, managers and other leaders will find Mix useful. The first users just started playing around with it last week.

If it doesn't work, we will learn something – then try again.