This is the first view of the widget which allows you to add holidays that you are planning for.  I added Christmas and Valentines day.  It then also allows you to take notes for each of the holidays you have added to your list.

Some of the things I would have liked to have seen here:

• Selection of holidays that I can add with one click. 
• In Context highlighting in the notes, so when I type in a note like  ”find Wii for Christmas”, it would automatically hyperlink the Wii or other known keywords to landing pages or the item itself. 
• Countdown to the next holiday date as well as countdown to the important days for ordering such as last day to order with standard shipping. 

The second view is called Experiences.  This one didn’t add much to the experience unfortunately.  It provided a few major categories of experiences you could have, with a few items in each that jump to the item on the web.  I would have liked to see the capability to add some profile information to the widget for my wife and kids including age and interests and it would provide back intelligent ideas.  I didn’t see much method to the madness here except what they wanted to promote. 

The third tab is “Week’s Picks”.  Oddly though it defaults to a map icon.   Clicking on the map icon prompts for your zip and it then launches the store locator in a browser window.   This was useful as a shortcut, but it’s not something I would use over and over.  Selecting a category on the left brought up promoted items in that category that linked to the item page on the web. 

To make this really useful:

• It would have been great to be able to add in my own wishlist of items and have it figure out what store had all or most of the items in stock. 
• Further on that train of thought, I could add an item like a Wii, and an alarm would go off letting me know the moment a shipment of Wii’s were coming in. 
• Last, with the wishlist, I would have liked to be able to set other alarms for when products go more than x% off or for $y price or below.   I think this information coming back into the merchandising team would be really interesting as you could analyze for the hot products and at what price points people were looking to obtain them for.    Almost a soft commit Priceline for retail products. 

Last is a standard search of their Internet site.   Nothing special.

This is the igoogle widget.  Same look and feel, but in your browser.

The uh-oh button was a great idea and reminded me of Friendlyware in the early 80′s with the bosskey that would escape out of a game to a screen that looked like work.  Unfortunately, Bestbuy’s implementation was just an exe that you put on your desktop forcing you to minimize/move your browser so you could find the icon and launch it.  I would suspect that most people that downloaded and tried it, had no idea what they were supposed to do with it.  A better implementation would have been in the webpage itself and when clicked it have taken the consumer to another page that looked like real work.  A whole ad campaign could have been made out this and would have appealed to many of the techies around. 

Overall it was a good effort, but it could have been a real driver of loyalty if implemented further with functionality that provided more value. 

Spacedog and Avenue A/Razorfish built the front & backend.  You can download the widgets at Bestbuy.com.

 What was that manager thinking?  It’s been in the news and all over the blogosphere.  I did some searching to see how many blog posts were out there, but unfortunately couldn’t get an accurate number due to spam in the Google blog index.  From a cursory glance, it was quite a bit.  Obviously these posts also generated quite a few comments.  A post at the Consumerist had 114 comments and 602 Diggs since posting their message and has been viewed more than 18,000 times in less than 3 days. 

 Word of mouth marketing is working over time on this one. 

I think getting the ads out earlier is an interesting way for smaller retailers to compete with the big box stores.  If the retailer isn’t going to be able to get the ad coverage, they might as well get their ads out now, build community mindshare and traffic to their site.   They can always leave some exclusives for later in the week.

A few interesting Stats from the session:

There are currently 1.5 billion pages of content built by consumers(Pew Research)
86% of consumers self identify that they create and share content

She also introduced the concept of the iCitizen which is this new evolving consumer that is passionate and contributes content around a brand.   She walked through about a half dozen icitizen’s and showed their impact over the past few years.  Unfortunately she had Macbook problems with her presentation so alot of the visuals didn’t come up.  When the slides are made available, I’ll see about revisiting the topic and sharing some of the case studies.

The other standout presentation was the Search: Advanced Level: Part Art, Part Science presented by Stephen Spencer of Netconcepts, Elaine Wu of Victoria’s Secret, and Steve Spangler of SteveSpanglerScience.com.  It was a fantastic presentation with a ton of tools and tips on optimizing your organic search.  I’ll write a post about that tomorrow along with the top exhibitors I saw today.

1.  Analytics
2. Merchandising for conversions
3. Search & SEO
4. Web 2.0

I’ve got to get back to the show, but later tonight I’ll cover the main points from the keynotes and what I’ve heard and learned.  Looks like it’s going to be a great event.

The video is at 4,251 views so far on Youtube after 6 months. I would be curious to know how much they spent on making it and the leads that were generated. Regardless, it was fun to watch.

This is Juggernaut traffic! This is not regular Internet traffic!