Marketing Executive: you can be a Catalyst

Take a look at what Barry Judge, Best Buy CMO is doing in his Blog and Twitter participation; not only is he putting himself out there and engaging with individuals at all levels (inside & outside his organization) and obtaining their take on Best Buy’s challenges, opportunities and initiatives. He is also using this forum to generate conversation and with this he is becoming a Catalyst; we all know is one thing to have ideas and another one to be willing to put them out there… clearly his name, style and title are inviting many to jump in and express their opinion; and this conversation renders great things… here a sample for it:

Take his “My Fascination With Social Technology” post and take a look at the comments that followed; here a few of my favorite snippets (highlights mine):

By Chuck Densinger:

“The implications for commercial businesses are fascinating. The Cluetrain Manifesto talks about the erosion of barriers between the inside and outside of corporations. We’re all people, after all, both inside and outside. Twitter seems to take us right to the quantum level, where we’re like particles that float through the “barrier” almost without noticing it…it’s so large, and we’re so small.”

“’Great Brands’ of the past 30 years typically have been icons which represent some experience or provide a badge the customer loves. What happens when the brand becomes transluscent, then transparent…..”

By Barry Judge himself:

“…the NASCAR event itself creates a great venue for customers and employees to interact, build relationships..”

“For us, a retail organization with high awareness, it only makes sense if we can create venues for our customers and employees to interact..”

And, abusing a little bit, let me add snippets of the comment Matt Johnston made to another post by Barry Judge (“Using Open Principles Test”)

“….BBY can facilitate ad-hoc communities around games, music, digital lifestyle, self serving customer support.….”

Let me try to connect it all together with my own lenses on: as Barry Judge himself pointed out there is a great opportunity to create venues where employees and customers interact; just like Nascar for Best Buy it is key to do that around “passions”; for car racing, digital photography, digital entertainment, etc.

The good news for Barry Judge is that his employees are already “out there” and they already are focused on these passions, and already are working as the “quantum level particles” that are entitled to mix and merge with their customers.. the question is: what can Best Buy (and you) do to focus and amplify those efforts? Organically developed efforts are great; but organically plus systematically supported can go farther.

What do you think?

Filiberto Selvas
Filiberto.Selvas@razorfish.com