I read this post last night on Techcrunch about Best Buy’s twitter campaign and thought it was a fantastic idea.

I think this would be a phenomenal way to improve customer service and live our brand promise. I understand that not everyone is on twitter but getting an account is so simple and there are so many ways to access it (a new user is bound to find one they are comfortable with).

Training
Obviously, the first step would be to make sure employees understand how twitter works and what the do’s and don’ts would be. (identifying oneself as an employee, not asking for any personal info, etc).

It is also important to offer training to new twitter users.  An easy solution to this might be to aggregate the best training videos (for the various twitter applications) from the web.

Sign-up
Best Buy created a custom web application that includes an employee number for sign-up.  The legal information is also a great template.

How it works
It is actually a rather simple solution for the users. By signing in, employees add their tweets to the best buy stream and also have the ability to tweet under the collective twitter account.  They do this by adding a keyword to their tweet.

Alternates
I know there are solutions out there to have multiple users share an account (co-tweet, hootsuite) but I really think that this is a better enterprise wide solution that does away with the scheduling aspects and makes it easy for all to get involved quickly.

Imagine if your university could have at least 1-2 employees from each department/school/program using this system.

best buy, brand, marketing, social media, twitter, web 2.0