How Best Buy Uses Social Media & Gaming

Best Buy Launches a Social Network

Two years ago Gary Koelling and Setev Bendt began work on a social networking site for Best Buy to help gather insights on advertising campaigns from employees on the front lines. Koeling and Bendt tackled the challenge of bringing 20-something, high turnover, retail employees together by launching BlueShirtNation. The network’s name comes from the signature blue polo shirts associates wear in-store.

With the help of Blueshirtnation Best Buy inspired and harnessed community engagement among its employees and accomplished, “higher participation in Best Buy’s 401(k) plan, lower employee turnover and photos of staffers’ pets”.

Marrying Social Media and Gaming

To get their employees on board with a new internal initiative Best Buy approached the interactive shop, Catalyst Studios, to build a game for BlueShirtNation. According to Catalyst, “the game, named Orbit was inspired by arcade [gaming] which centers around a leader board that allows employees to see high scores company-wide as they compete against one another”. Acutely aware of gamers’ tendency to talk trash, Catalyst added a twist to the game in the form of a verbal lashing: after every game, the players are taunted no matter how high the score.

I had a chat with Jared Lukes, the Interactive Director at Catalyst to discuss the game design process.

Jared Lukes on the Game Development Process

Ms. Pixel: So how did this project come about? And could you shed more light on the game development process?

Jared Lukes: Best Buy approached us and said, “We’re going to use a game to roll out an internal project. We don’t want to use obtuse banner ads”. They wanted something that would be fun to engage employees internally. To reach mass engagement we had to think about getting one player to evangelize another by building a competitive nature into the game.

Ms. Pixel: That sounds like fun. The inclusion of features like a leader board can make for an intense gaming experience (just look at Braid). Could you shed more light on how those features came about?

Jared Lukes: We made it easy for players to integrate the game into their profiles. After playing it users don’t have to worry about logging their score. The game is aware of who is playing the game and automatically updates it for them. When you achieve a fairly good score at the end it asks if you want to put a badge (gold, silver or bronze) on your profile. We also created a character called Orbit whose sole purpose was to go around the site taunting people by leaving notes on their profiles. By taunting the users we were able to get them fired up.

Ms. Pixel: What else is in store for Blueshirtnation?

Jared Lukes: We’re talking about making an iPhone version of the game in addition to spreading it across more platforms.

On the Success of the Game

It looks like the game has been successful so far. Jared told me that players have been known to log long hours on the game only to leave a note saying, “Must go to sleep now”. It’s too bad the game isn’t open to the public because I’d like to try it out.

UPDATE: You’ll find more information on the game that Catalyst Studios developed for Best Buy here.

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