Most company intranet sites are one-way streets, with management broadcasting the “company line” to employees. Best Buy, the U.S. retail chain, uses the opposite approach in a contribution system dubbed BlueShirt Nation. BlueShirt Nation allows employees to share and discuss their ideas and experiences: what works and what doesn’t in carrying out a particular task or in interacting with customers, for example. The site, launched two years ago by two junior employees with no corporate IT support or funding, today has more than 20,000 registered employee users.

Best Buy has discovered that unfiltered information from colleagues can be more effective than memos from HR. For example, Blue Shirt Nation ran a contest in which employees submitted videos they had conceived and produced, with no company oversight, to spur employee adoption of 401(k) plans. The result of the buzz generated by the contest? Participation increased from 17% to 46%!

Check out this The Company as Wiki video, where the CEO of BestBuy talks about their use of social tools:

Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson in conversation with Peter Hirshberg at Google Zeitgeist from peter hirshberg on Vimeo.

Note that he says that sharing the employee-created video with BestBuy's board of directors "did not work" (at 16:45 in the video) -- even though clearly the video itself worked.  He also shares that for the first time in history of the company, turnover was under 50%; two and a half years ago, it was 130%.

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