1. Dear Important
Customer, How
May I Twelp You?
Now I don’t know about you, although I love tech gadgets, I am also a little
intimidated by them. I’d love to be able to have someone available who understood
what I was asking without going into a store where I’m likely to feel the sales
pressure. Enter Best Buy’s new social media customer support via Twitter
called Twelpforcehttp://twitter.com/#!/TWELPFORCE.
Twelpforce To
The Rescue
Twelpforce is a few thousand of Best Buy’s employees joining together to use
Twitter to reach out to help current or potential Best Buy customers. The rules for
being part of Twelforce are that they have to identify themselves as Best Buy
employees, never ask a customer for personal information, and amazingly… don’t
try to sell the customer anything. The idea is that Best Buy is online and available
24 hours a day to help answer your questions about something you bought or
something you’re thinking of buying whether you are planning the make the
purchase at a Best Buy store or not.
Here’s a brief description of the program. For such a big company, you’ve got to
love the unpolished human touch to this video.

2. In the case of Best Buy, they have identified their most important influencers as
anybody interested in buying electronics. In my opinion it was a brilliant move to
enlist thousands of their employees to pitch in and communicate directly with these
people.
What Do We
Think
Twelpforce Does
Right?
• It’s Real – Twelpforce is run by real employees of real stores. They deal on
the ground level with customers everyday, so who better to put into
conversation with them online?

3. • It’s always available – There are no office hours on Twelpforce. Need a
question answered about your iPod at 2am… just ask.
• It’s Transparent – Although Twelpforce is primarily a Twitter program they
are testing out a related program called Feed http://www.bbyfeed.com that
aggregates all the questions and answers that run through the system in real
time. Go there now and see this living breathing customer service support
system. All the comments both good and bad are there for anyone to see.
Nothing to me builds trust faster than transparency.
“I want to reach
my customer too
but don’t have
2000 employees
to do it”
While we love this story of out-of-the-box customer service thinking we are also
very aware that most companies are pretty far from being able to pull off
something like this. In fact, that’s the reason we started SocialMatica Inc. in the
first place. We are building software for you to reach the people who already have
the ears and eyes of your audience. If you can reach them effectively they in turn
can become your companies “Twelpforce.”
Twelpforce is just one example of how big brands are reaching the most influential
people in their market and turning them into brand advocates. How do you connect
to the influencers in your market?
Posted in: Influencer Marketing, SocialMatica