This morning, I came across Brian White's
blog post praising Best Buy for their efforts to connect their customers with a
Geek Squad branded
http://fixya.com site. It is a model built upon the backs of thousands of technical support evangelists operating under web 2.0 do-goodisms and according to fixya.com since 2006, their site has grown to over 700,000 pages.
While I find it quite interesting, I just don't get it. What motivates these do-gooder techs to spend their evenings and weekends helping strangers?
Now, while I get why individuals in a smaller community forum will help out people they regularly associate with even if only in a virtual community, fixya.com seems to operate on such a large scale that a quick visit on their site gives me little sense of community.
This forces me to think through my own situation. While I'm willing to take a call from Grandma Myrna to walk her through how to connect to the internet, I am not willing to spend that same time for a complete stranger. Maybe when the kids are grown and out of the home, I'll have more time but give me 20 years to think about that one.
Interestingly, Brian talks about Best Buy's motivation here "to provide its customers with an additional way to receive support as fast and efficiently as possible before handing in-depth issues directly to a Geek Squad representative."
Okay, so I think I'm finally reading between the lines. This is Best Buy's cost-efficient way to sluff off the tech support hassles to a web 2.0 community while rerouting the money makers to their Geek Squad techs.
That has got to be the case . . .
