I sat down tonight with notes and ideas for a blog post about how Twitter and tools like Spy have the potential to evolve business ettiquette for the better.  Those who attended or viewed via Spy or search.twitter.com the Best Buy Connected Digital Strategy Meeting (#bbyscds) last week or who participate in the Creative Summit (#bbycs) being held later this morning at 9am CST can witness the beginnings of this phenomena.  It is fascinating to me to imagine how many old-school enterprise leaders would throw you out of their office if you said that they should encourage employees to write and engage in an online social application while they present important strategies from the front of the room.  I will have to get back to writing this one soon. (My business etiquette post)

My conversation last week with Laura Fitton included her suggestion to read and follow Doc Searls and his Vendor Relationship Management Project. 

It seems there are PILES of blog posts and wiki entries to read, not to mention Searls' Clue Train Manifesto.  These links were just shared with me for the first time a few hours ago so clearly, I have reading to do.  I've touched only a few paragraphs from the Harvard wiki (linked above) so far.  I was surprised to see only about 100 people following VRM on Twitter.

I say "surprised" because it is this project that feels like the answer to some monumental business challenges in the monetization of social media.  In addition, Project VRM could be mining the ore that can eventually turn into the business model for traditional retail enterprises. 

My initial reading pulled my eyes wide open as I considered my work on BlueShirt Nation Bazaar.  Bazaar is part of Best Buy's internal social network that is being used to connect vendors directly with Best Buy employees.  Bazaar is on the tail end of an intial test (about five months) and is nearly ready to scale up for broader adoption.  I mention Bazaar as I believe it could serve as a VRM tool in the near future by giving customers a way create direct relationships with vendors.

Since I have so much to learn about the topic, I will not attempt to write at length about it yet.  I just felt compelled to mention this enormous and very shiney distraction.

Some would say that the best insights, innovations, and conversations from within enterprise social networks occur when the hierarchy is flattened, eliminated or at least masked in some way and users can be anonymous. When the leaders trust and empower their people enough to police themselves – frank comments often possess the highest value even if they have an edge. Often times, the rough edge of a comment is a symptom of real passion.

BlueShirt Nation (BSN), the internal social network for Best Buy employees, has created that atmosphere. Employees know that they can speak candidly. BSN is user-driven for both content and the structure of the site. It's their space.

Clearly, BSN has been highly decorated and mentioned repeatedly in the blogosphere as a benchmark for how enterprise social networks should perform. BSN Founders, Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling, would say that the site is a fluke. If that is not true, it surely is a product of a perfect storm that mixed tolerant enterprise leadership, patient and open-minded founders, a prime target demographic (most Best Buy employees are in their late teens and early twenties) and several other factors.

My head has thoughts to share during my return from Appliance Summit in Boston. This was a gathering of Best Buy store supervisors who won an internal contest based on customer experience performance. The event began with a vendor show and included other more festive activities that are suitable for contest winners prepared to celebrate victory.

I attended the event as an internal vendor at the show representing Best Buy's internal social-network, BlueShirt Nation (BSN), and the new BSN Bazaar which gives a secure space for Best Buy employees to connect directly with key vendors without allowing those vendors access to the employee-to-employee discussions on BSN.

Bazaar is in the early stages of a pilot program. The vendors involved volunteered to be first-in with the understanding that they were stepping into an unpolished site with testing and proving value as a the mission.