BlueShirt Nation (BSN) – in case you did not already know- is Best Buy's internal social network. Bazaar is an extension of BSN that brings vendors into the space to interact directly with employees for questions, suggestions and insights.

My work lately has been been on the launch of Bazaar which launched officially early this month.

My current challenge is content vs. users. Since I am a student of the Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt school of social media development, I am of the belief that you build small. Then you recruit a few passionate users. Get them using the space. Then let them tear it apart and tell you all the things that suck about it.

My dilemma is that I have a number of anxious vendors that are eager to dive in and make a 1,000 Blue Shirt friends. They are beating the doors on one side. On the other side, I have a pool of BSN'rs that are engaged but need to be more active to keep all the vendors engaged.

We have started with just three vendors in the space. Each vendor has about 10 representatives for now. I'm keeping the number low as we are still working through some user interface improvement and a few bugs.

After we work through those issues, I want to invite the waiting vendors into the space.

They want to “get” it. Corporate leaders are reading news articles and hearing from their marketing constituencies that leveraging the power and buzz around virtual communities is:

• essential for long-term health of the brand

• essential for competing with key rivals

• essential for establishing contact with new customers

• essential for maintaining contact with existing customers

• essential for fostering internal innovation

• essential because if we don't participate in those virtual spaces, the conversation will go on without us and about us.

So then the leaders are on-board. They agree. They're ready to loosen purse strings. An aggressive sales job like one employed by Salesforce or MS Sharepoint can pull those purse strings wide-open. Then a blog entry like the one written by Marshal Kirkpatrick becomes inevitable.

Making this comparison almost feels dirty to me. I mean, radio is the down trending mass medium. Facebook is the new media frontier.

Radio is notoriously behind when it comes to the incorporation of social trends. I first sold commercial radio advertising in 1995 and, at that time, my company had a policy against having any kind of radio station website caused by fears of hackers opening HR files and on-air inventory status. Maybe it was a fear leftover from one too many viewings of Matthew Broderick in War Games. I digress. Nevertheless, radio has a long history of generating revenues.

One local radio station in Minneapolis/St. Paul estimates revenues at $1MM annually for sales of advertising programs on their website. Site traffic was estimated by one source at 100,000 uniques per month. Compete.com estimated their recent peak monthly traffic at closer to 20,000 per month. For the sake of conservative estimates, let's average those two figures – 60,000 uniques/month.

Minneapolis/St. Paul Radio Station Website Advertising Revenue

$1MM Annual revenue from internet advertising sales / 12 Months = $83,333/month

$83,333 per month / 60,000 unique visitors per month = $1.38 per user per month

Facebook Revenues

Estimated Facebook revenues for 2008 are $300 MM - $350 MM according to WSJ interview with Mark Zuckerberg posted January 31, 2008.

Social Networking (and blogging in particular) has already done much to impact how people behave and communicate. It's a movement. The shift has started for the way we consume media. This change was preceded by a more general change. The internet had already served to reduce the amount of time people spend with traditional media. People began to consume their news, shop and find love online.

Now, we have expanded our business and personal relationships and found a way to keep track of 100's of people with daily or even up to the minute updates. The news we consume is not always served up by a media powerhouse. We're reading personal opinions and following expert writings to keep tabs on the topics most important to us.

Writing for the Social Media Explorer, Kat French wrote about where our minds went 50 years ago:

"...mid-century folks had no idea what to do with the cognitive (time and attention) surplus created by modern conveniences. So they tuned in and zoned out."

Television does all the things we tell our kids. It slows creativity. It hinders imagination. We sit together and watch... but we don't communicate.

“Shouldn't we be doing something about this social networking thing?”

The C-level people are aware that something is going on out there on that internet machine... thingy. They are walking into the marketing department, IT department, their website administrator, or worse yet, their advertising agency and and asking this exact question. My suspicion is that, more often than not, they aren't sure what they're asking about. However, they don't want to be left behind. It's a start. The conversation has begun.

Embracing social technologies is unexplored territory in the minds of many enterprise leaders. Fortunately for them, the territory has brave explorers. Trails have been blazed.

Traversing these trails needs to be approached by each adventuress company in it's own way. The important thing to do, is to start moving.

For the brave companies that venture off into this unknown wilderness, the rewards are shiny and valuable. Customers give candid feedback on process and products. They engage the brand – show their passion.  They complain about problems and uncover every product or service blemish. Brave companies that venture into social media get real honesty.