I follow Chris Pirillo on Twitter and a recent entry of his caught my eye:
chrispirillo: Can a Company Take Social Networking too Far? http://bit.ly/1ZScf7 — 12:51pm
The link leads to a post on his blog discussing news that Best Buy may be requiring new sales associate applicants to have at least 250 followers on Twitter. He asked for feedback and I responded in the comments, but made a couple of minor editing and writing mistakes which drives me nuts, so I decided to reproduce a corrected response here.
You’ll want to read his post first for the following to make any sense.
Chris,
The Best Buy Twitter requirement may not be quite as wacky as it seems. In the non-retail world, sales people have long been responsible not only for finding the cold customer, but for bringing a batch of sales leads with them.
To make a fair assessment, I’d have to know more about the specifics of the requirements, though. Is BB wanting these folks to actively use their personal Twitter networks for sales purposes? That carries a high backlash risk and is not likely to last long, especially in the consumer electronics space where high pressure sales tactics often run people off. Is BB simply using Twitter in the same way many companies use a Bachelors degree or “years of experience” requirement: a way to quickly throw out the applications that are simply a waste of time?
It’s impossible to truly know without being part of the internal strategy meetings, but the latter makes sense to me. It would actually be pretty smart for BB to use Twitter as a weed-out mechanism during a period where they are no doubt being flooded with applications, many from people for whom sales is not a primary skill.
While a large following does not guarantee that the applicant will have the networking skills implied for all of the reasons you list, it does make the odds a lot better. I’d wager that the number of people with more than 250 followers who aren’t providing either some content with value or decent networkers is relatively low.
I don’t fully agree with your statement that it’s not the employee’s job to drum up sales. As a Sales Associate (or whatever BB is calling them these days), that’s more or less exactly their job, though we’ve come to expect much much less from most BB folks on the floor. Granted, as a major retailer BB has potentially better channels in which to work, but who’s to say that augmenting traditional sales and marketing efforts by shifting the company’s Social Media efforts down to the people who actually “get it” isn’t a really interesting approach?
Ultimately, the market will decide if it’s a good idea or not, but, depending on the true rationale behind the requirement (assuming it exists), this is exactly the type of corporate experiment that ends up being a Harvard Business Review case study.
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