Ask your employees to tweet on your company’s behalf

Examining its month-old Twelpforce, Best Buy talks about its successes and failures

Are you thinking of hiring out your Twitter feed? Maybe you’ve debated who will tweet from your small, overworked communications team. Consider this: You have easy access to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who are knowledgeable about your company and enthusiastic about your products or services.

Who constitute this miracle cadre? Your employees, of course. They’re close and usually quite eager to share their company expertise, if only you’d let them. They’re adults, and they have common sense; they don’t need to be stifled by hyper-restrictive social media policies. They just need to be pointed in the right direction and given the green light.

Best Buy has asked its employees to do just that. It has opened its customer service Twitter feed, Twelpforce, to any of its hourly store employees and salaried corporate employees who want to join. Employees are free to engage customers with questions or even angry customers in their own voice and in any way they see fit. The rules? DON’T talk about private company or customer information; DO be friendly and helpful.