Thought I’d qualify this post with a response from the Best Buy @twelpforce team.

We appreciate your feedback – really. I say that because we realize we’re a long way from our utopia, which is using twitter to contribute to our customer’s lives in a meaningful manner, and help them realize their tech-dreams. But, we’re learning… Every day brings more knowledge to our associates as they figure out “what’s right/good” on their own. Certainly we have guidelines for participation (www.bestbuy.com/connect), but we’ve purposely left out of our training any kind of “Here’s how it should look when you tweet” manual because authenticity is key, that wisdom will come from actually “doing”, and from peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

Doomed? I respectfully disagree. We’re still organizing the troops, and will soon be rolling out some technical tools/widgets to our associates that will make manual searching for questions a thing of the past. As well, we’re working on a bug that prevents responses hashtagged with #twelpforce from appearing in the @twelpforce feed (Hence, the re-tweet of your question that had already been answered within one hour by another associate). Glitch or not, I’m glad it seemed to work. With regard to your question as to whether you may get 10 answers to your question, we actually expect that. Each associate will have a POV, and 1 or 2 may be more suited for your needs, but at a minimum, you are armed with (free) info before you buy. That’s the point….

Because Twitter is such a public forum, we are not granted a grace period to work the bugs out, unfortunately. I say to our team it’s like getting dressed in a glass house. Sure, we’ll make mistakes, and they will be public mistakes, but the effort is genuine, and the voices authentic. We’re leveraging our biggest asset, our store employees, to try and deliver a great experience. We expect (and planned for) there to be some glitches, and we’re actively coaching our employees on what good looks like.

I’m proud to work for a company that supports the idea that we can, and should, harness the power of our employees, and share our POV’s freely with those who solicit a question. My hope is that you and your readers will give us some time to evolve before writing this effort off. It’s got potential to play a part in a help change the perception of the way brands, the people that make them up, and customers create and maintain relationships.

Respectfully
@bernierjohn