This is a guest post from Lars Forsberg about the making of Best Buy Connect and Twelpforce. Lars is a Project Manager for Enomaly with an affinity for open source and social media. He is also a friend.
In late May, Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt came to Enomaly looking for our help to realize their latest brainchild, called Connect. We’d previously worked with Best Buy to develop an internal social networking site called Blueshirt Nation and we were pleased to have another opportunity to collaborate with them.
Inspired by Ben Hedrington’s ConnectTweet, the concept was simple; Connect BlueShirts directly with customers via twitter. In less than two months, Enomaly developed a Python application on Google App Engine to syndicate tweets from Best Buy employees and rebroadcast them. Thereby allowing customers to ask questions via twitter (@twelpforce) and have the answer crowdsourced to a vast network of Best Buy employees who are participating in the service. Now the answer to “looking for a Helmet Cam I can use for snowboarding and road trips” is only a tweet away.
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