LF: What has been the corporate perspective on doing this at Best Buy? Was it a hard sell?

BB: Headmix has some good demo videos and was cool about explaining basically what it does — “here’s the cool use cases we see, etc.” We were able to talk about use cases and they were willing to adjust. Potentially this is just the advantage of working with a startup.

The initial assumption was that it would be hosted within Best Buy. But as is the case with a lot of enterprise systems, we had to look at whether we could really support and host it in-house, more politically than technically.

So many companies miss “Just Try It.” Nobody wants to just go ahead.

That said, we’re in a unique situation with BSN Labs — we essentially have a license to try pilots and see whats going to take off. So the conversation was, us: “We’re going to have a mobile version of Blue Shirt Nation.” Management: “oh, cool.”

People have stopped asking us about metrics, measurement and goals. They see that it’s a cost of doing business. Nobody questions whether you need to have phones anymore, its assumed.

LF: Nice position to be in.

BB: Whatever happens, it’s going to be cool to try it. We’ll learn something. Sometimes, the bigger things get the more fear it will fail.

I expect to see blowback on a lot of this stuff by next March. “I don’t need all this stuff.” People are going to start stepping back some. Enterprises are getting hammered so hard right now to try all this stuff. There will be some cutting back in what they can do, depending on what’s working.

LF: Thanks guys. We look forward to hearing more.

More about HeadMix from Pistachio Consulting's Enterprise Microsharing Tools survey:

HeadMix Inc.’s mission is to help employees collaborate and work more effectively by discovering knowledge that trapped inside their colleagues heads. It’s a lightweight, on-demand, easy-to-use messaging platform that promotes intuitive knowledge-sharing inside the enterprise via the web, email, mobile and SMS.

With HeadMix, users subscribe to other employees and/or relevant groups/topics allowing them to stay connected with the content that is most relevant. Questions get answered sooner; key conversations can weave into the workday; and news travels faster. HeadMix connects employees and makes them more valuable to other employees and their customers.

Features:

• Deploy inside firewall? No.
• Most of Twitter’s functions? Most.
• Groups, Location and a Desktop Client? Yes.
• Integrates with Twitter? No.
• Size of largest company? 150,000
• SMS? Yes.
• IM? Future.
• Built on: Ruby on Rails.
• Links and media sharing? All types.
• API? Yes.
• Largest trial group? 20,000.
• Price/user/month: based on active users only.
• Twitter-compatible API? Yes.
• Smartphone applications? Future.

Other notes:

• Fully integrates into enterprise daily existing workflow
• Ability to integrate custom applications
• Make customers’ existing apps more valuable by adding a social layer around them via email (Outlook), Sharepoint, etc.

Laura "@Pistachio" Fitton is Founder and Principal of Pistachio Consulting, and one of the first prominent "microbloggers." Her TouchBase Blog is a leading source of information about microsharing for business. You can find the original article there.