• Financial Times, Tuesday, July 14, 2009 10:38 AM

Barry Judge, the marketing chief at Best Buy, is using social networks to ask his customers to define the role of a new senior marketer who will be in charge of the company's use of word-of-mouth marketing using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other internet forums, Jonathan Birchall reports.

"We're discovering that the issue of how to identify talent in this space may be a sore point for other companies as well," Judge says of his experiment in "crowd-sourcing."

Birchall reports that Best Buy's Idea X site was showing over a dozen proposals yesterday. One of them sums up the difficulty of trying to get a handle on such a quickly evolving phenomenon as social media: Any effort to pin it down probably will be instantly obsolete.

Read the whole story at Financial Times »