Best Buy engages young staff through online dialogue

Best Buy keeps it pretty simple with its social media policy: “Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.”

Companies have to keep it simple, Andrew Hokenson, a senior specialist of employee communications with the electronics retailer, told an audience at Ragan Communications’ Intranet Summit in November. “You do need to have some kind of policy, or else your legal teams will freak out,” he warns. But you can’t let your legal department complicate things too much or try to control employees.

That’s especially true at Best Buy, a company of 170,000 people where the average retail employee is 27 years old, and the average corporate worker is 38. Because its employee base is so young, Hokenson said the company is necessarily “a little further along the line in the social media space.”