The goal with Mix is to better network, problem-solve and share ideas among Best Buy’s 160,000 employees. Around 24,000 employees are already active on Blue Shirt Nation, so the conditions are ripe for Mix to become widespread.

This is a guest post by Laura "@Pistachio" Fitton, Founder and Principal of Pistachio Consulting.

Gary and Steve took time recently to tell me more about Mix, HeadMix (the application it’s built with) and their plans for a “mobile Blue Shirt Nation.”

LF: Until a few weeks ago, there weren’t many publicly announced applications that could do something like this. When did you start looking for a provider to build an internal “Twitter” for Best Buy?

BB: We started talking to Headmix in March or April of 2008.

LF: You’d personally just started on Twitter then, so how did you know what you were seeking?

BB: We’re both social bookmarking junkies because sharing links is such a fast, easy way to share ideas. You just smack somebody with a URL. So we wanted something like that for Blue Shirt Nation. Something that combined mobile access with simple link sharing.

We also knew that for Blue Shirt Nation, the adoption rate drops off fast as you climb the hierarchy. Executives just don’t spend a lot of time using their browsers. Mostly, they’re attached to smartphones and Outlook, with some General Managers texting. So other than the short formats, the idea of a device agnostic network was appealing.

The other group of employees we want to reach better are General Managers in the stores. They don’t have a lot of time, but they might be able to fire off an update while they’re walking from the front of the store to the back. Again, looking at Blue Shirt Nation, the majority of use (by retail staff) is during breaks and before or after work. So for this group also, we wanted something with mobile access.

LF: How closely will Mix integrate with Blue Shirt Nation?

BB: We looked at a deeper integration and ended up with something simpler. It will look like BSN, and the applications will keep each other informed, but Mix will function like the mobile arm of BSN.

LF: What’s the time frame for rollout?

BB: It’s coming very soon. One big hurdle has been waiting for carriers to give us the short codes. That was long wait. There’s also been a lot of technical work on integration and authentication. By mid-to-end October we’ll have it live within one territory (out of 8).