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By Tom Groenfeldt
Shortly after he bought a book on Amazon, a Best Buy executive received a Twitter message suggesting that if he liked what he had just purchased he should consider buying another specific title.
Recounting this story at the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York, Mark Williams, president of financial services at Best Buy, said the recommendation came from the Bookie, a 20-year-old part-time fireman in Connecticut who had written an algorithm that taps into Amazon's open API and offers recommendations to Amazon customers.
Williams said he has expanded from books into DVDs. In four weeks, the Bookie had persuaded 20,000 people to buy through his tweets.
Best Buy stumbled across the Bookie by pure chance, said Williams. "He sold 50,000 units of books and DVDs in two months, moving the whole process out of bricks and mortar," he said. "He has no marketing costs and no inventory. How many people are out there taking your business away?"
The lesson for retailers like Best Buy is that they risk becoming irrelevant if this sort of crowd-sourcing is attacking everything they do, he added.
To stay current, Best Buy is moving to more digital marketing that will include push, pull, shared and crowd-source channels, he said. Along the way it is learning what not to do. If you send a thank-you note to a customer for shopping, don't invite them to come back to buy something again -- save that for a second note.
Make the offers as specific as possible, depending on what the customers have bought before. Best Buy sends out 20 million to 30 million e-mails a weekend in 10 million variations, he said. The goal is to have an e-mail that is customized for each recipient. It also realizes that customers won't accept nuisance e-mails.
"If you slam people with irrelevant messages you get unsubscribed and it will be hard to get that customer back," he said.
Best Buy is getting into social networking actively, starting near the top of the company.
Barry Judge, the company's chief marketing officer, is active on Twitter, where he recently posted an announcement of Best Buy's new video network and its coverage of the International Consumer Electronics Show. Best Buy posts previews of some nearly final TV ads on YouTube and invites reader commentary, and put up many of the year's final cuts there as well, featuring real employees in clips that are 15 to 30 seconds long. They're enough fun to keep you scrolling through -- then again, it doesn't take that long to see a whole bunch of them. They have the ironic edge associated with AFLAC commercials.
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