Best Buy, Twitter, Crowdsourcing, and the Associated Press
Who needs job boards when you have the associated press?
At some point in the near future there will be a much longer blog post/case study on this thing, but wanted to note a quick mention on this developing story. We’ve been doing some crowd-sourcing at Best Buy and its getting some crazy run right now. Here’s the story.
Stage 1: A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a job we have open, Sr Manager, Emerging Media Marketing. Basically the person who gets the role will lead all the marketing that is done using social media, mobile and video. Ok, nothing out of the ordinary so far.
Stage 2: I sent @ replies about the job via Twitter to Jason Falls and Barry Judge. Both of whom graciously re-tweeted it which generated a cascade of retweets from their followers.
Stage 3: I also sent an @ reply of the job via Twitter to Jeremiah Owyang. He also graciously retweeted it, with a major difference. He noticed among the qualifications for the job, 250+ followers on Twitter as a preferred qualification. The re-tweets went bananas from there. Blog posts were spawned, some were elated with the now infamous “250 twitter followers” qualification, some were dismissive and didn’t like it, many had alternate ideas for qualifications.
Stage 4: I went to Barry Judge with the idea that we should crowdsource the job description. He loved it, fully supported it, said go. We went.
Stage 5: People talked about it on Twitter, Friendfeed, on their blogs; online. They also submitted ideas for alternative job descriptions to Best Buy’s IdeaX site.
Stage 6: A lot of people blogged about it. Now the Associated Press picked it up. As did a dizzying amount of others.
The job isn’t even posted yet.
Cost = zero dollars.
Perhaps, there might be something to this crowd-sourcing, social media ballyhoo after all? Granted, this is lightning in a bottle, but there are some lessons to be learned here methinks; a lot of them. Stay tuned to this blog here and Barry Judge’s blog for updates, and the case study coming once we’ve made the hire.
