Twelpforce is Best Buy’s answer to leveraging employee downtime to harness a little social media power with the intent to bring more customers in the doors. One awkwardly positive post praises Best Buy for their innovation in this initiative, though it should be noted that Dell actually pioneered this form of customer service in 2007 well before the Twitterverse explosion and saw a ROI of over $3M (source). But of course, I’m writing this because I’m not so optimistic for the ol’ boys in blue. Especially not after today…
I started digging and saw Best Buy Marketing Manager and TwelpForce launch supporter Mr. John Bernier’s tweet that nearly 600 people signed on to the program already. I thought, “Great! Time for a test-drive!”

I hopped on search.twitter.com, dropped in “TwelpForce”, and checked out who was already chatting it up. One ambitious employee was clearly happy about being paid to tweet, but I wasn’t sure why he’d attach the #TwelpForce hashtag to that post. I didn’t dwell on it long before I came across what appeared to be a hashtag-highjack, rather loudly proclaiming:

GET A NETBOOK FOR 99CENTS, REAL TALK! ASK ME HOW. #twelpforce
-RainbowSoulPoet

Voice inside my head: “Wow, spammers have already picked up on this hashtag?!” Again, didn’t dwell on it too long, until I saw the same spammer posting a suggestion to her fellow TwelpForce associates to add a pic and bio to their profile appear more personable. This recommendation coming from this profile page:

Now listen…. I’m a pretty open-minded guy, but I’m fairly certain that without too much work I could find some people who wouldn’t appreciate a Best Buy associate name tag explaining they’re a 27 year old black lesbian who uses biblical love making to define her relationship to music. And if somehow that didn’t ruffle some feathers, perhaps her wandering around the store talking about “ass cleavage” would do it. Further, let’s not forget the spammy $0.99 laptop post that nobody on Twitter wants to see (even though it was a legitimate BBY Promo). Are you here to help or here to sell?

Am I picking on one person? Yes, but it was just so easy. If this person managed to sign on and get paid for being derogatory, it’s worth mentioning, right?

Ok, enough about that, let’s see how it works. . .

I saw a few imaging associates seemed to be signed on, so I thought I’d ask a very specific imaging question about something that is actually not very well defined online despite many reviews on the product. My question as seen to the left was posted at 10:48am regarding what format the HD video records in for the purpose of loading it into my video editing software.

The response came exactly 20 minutes later and was in fact exactly right. Though I would have like to have received a little more specifics like, “1080p @20fps and 720p @30fps”, I was satisfied with the response and it didn’t take too long. This did however bring up another concern.

Notice the reply is not threaded. Whether this was the fault of the responder or a fault of their program’s API coding is unclear, but this poses two problems for the program.

1. Linking answers to questions is important for people to see the process working.
2. It is important to ensure clarity in communication (depending on the time lapse, I may be well into another conversation).

But then this morning, another problem arose that I thought their system would be handling when I saw John Bernier re-tweet my question to his team at 12:26am last night. If Best Buy’s administration isn’t tracking responses through their system, what is to keep me from getting 100 responses across the entire TwelpForce crew and all associates being oblivious to it? Then I thought back to the case of RainbowSoulPoet and wondered if Best Buy realizes that if their employees post something inappropriate, it can be deleted from the associate’s feed, but is already permanently indexed and can forever be found by search (plus, if any of the links in this post magically go broken, I have screen-caps already uploaded to my server to replace them).

My overall feel of TwelpForce quickly faded from poorly-polished to poorly planned and ill-fated. Social media is a tricky beast. Direct sales are not welcome. It is purely about building brand and trust. But that’s a post for another time.

Best Buy has already been laughed at for their Senior Manager job posting, citing a 7-year degree and 1-day on Twitter as a requirement (help them rewrite it?). But now it is becoming increasingly apparent what that position was created for and that maybe Best Buy really doesn’t know what they’re doing, nor are they aware of how damaging this can be to their reputation instead of augmenting it.

I’m sure some good folks from Best Buy will read this eventually, and I encourage you to sit down and study Dell’s process as an example. If you’re branding “TwelpForce” as “Twitter + Help + Sales Force”, I’m sorry, but you’re doomed already. If you’re going to help, then help. Don’t sell. And if you’ve made the mistake of hiring someone who claims to be a “Social Media Expert”, then I feel extra sorry for you.

I can be reached by any means on my contact card if you want to talk. Otherwise, good luck to you, and I trust you’ll use this as food for thought!

Update: John Bernier has demonstrated some terrific character in handling the response to TwelpForce’s launch, even going so far as to tweet this post to all of his employees and encourage them to re-tweet it. It’s refreshing to see a company respond effectively instead of launching a cover-up campaign. I applaud John and his team for the massive amount of scrutiny they’re taking on with this project and again wish them well!

As Web 2.0 continues to evolve, so do our chances of meeting people and networking with some real talent. There are a multitude of social sites to apply this strategy to, so just think of this as a “hey, maybe there is life outside the box” kick in the head in an info-product-but-it’s-free-info kind of way.

When the Affiliates Don’t Come to You, Go to Them.

Yeah, I said it. Swallow your pride and go head-hunting. If you’ve got a great product and competitive commissions, go find someone qualified in your niche and show them how to make money in your program. Twitter is all the rage lately, so let’s take a quick look at how easy this is to execute. Depending on the size of your niche, the length of this process will vary.

Start out at  Search.Twitter.com (this link is also found in the footer link section of any Twitter page). This is like Google, but exclusively searches tweets. If you’ve never used this service by Twitter, you need to sit and think for a minute about how powerful it is to find people at any time who are talking about anything in that same moment. That is typically how it is used – to find out what’s hot, what’s being talked about, and who you can communicate with about whatever is on your mind.

What I want you to do is flip the coin. Don’t just look at Twitter as a great place to meet potential clients who share your interests and could likely benefit from your product or service. Instead, find other professionals in your niche who are already offering valuable content to the same people. Here comes the “for instance”…

If you have a product for “[your keyphrase here]“:

1. Do a Twitter search on your primary or related keyphrase.
2. Look for the box in the upper right of the screen subscribe to the query RSS. It will look like this:
   
   This will create an RSS feed that updates every time a new result would show in the search query.
3. Review the results regularly and watch for links pointing followers to related products in your niche.
4. Start networking with the leaders already in your niche who have a decent following but understand that their following might be all fluff and they may not have a “real” list to work with. Take time to see how they interact with others and whether or not their followers respond.
5. Once you’ve felt them out over a period of time, direct message the ones you would like to work with and let them know you’d like to offer them a JV deal that you have determined could be instantly profitable for them based on their following.
6. Get them on-board and help them help you.

I came across this method by accident but I was surprised at how easy and effective it is. Make sure you both use tact and proper social-media-etiquette (don’t spam) to protect your reputations. This will either be highly adventageous for you, or ruin you both. No pressure.

Once you’ve run a successful JV, get a video testimonial from them, revamp your sales page, and it’s off to the races to test your new offer to potential customers and affiliates.

The added benefit of this is you will also have a chance to have your product or service critiqued by another professional in your niche since you will be working closely together and they may be able to shed some light onto why you’re having trouble to begin with.

You’ll be able to quickly sharpen up your product, pitch, following, and “stickyness” of your campaign in no time and start reaping the rewards you’ve been missing out on, all while making your first successful affiliate a partner in crime for a long time to come.

To your continued success.