Part 1 of a 2-part interview.
Patrick Michael Byrne is chairman and CEO of Overstock.com, Inc., a Utah-based Internet retailer that has been publicly traded since 2002. Under Patrick's leadership the company's annual revenue has grown from $1.8 million in 1999 to over a billion in 2010.
Patrick has a black belt in tae kwon do and once pursued a career in boxing. After surviving cancer, he cycled across the country four times. His last ride, in the summer of 2000, helped raise awareness and record-breaking funds for cancer research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. On April 1, SDC interviewed Patrick over the phone.
SMT: I'm always glad to talk to people who are operating at the enterprise level of social media and are enthusiastic about it.
Byrne: We love it. We're using social media both external-facing and internally where we have a great enterprise 2.0 platform that we're adding to every month. We're also very excited about our external 2.0 efforts.
SMT: I can tell by your bio that you're a very adventurous person, but as CEO of Overstock were you always seeking to be on the cutting edge of social media or did you wait to see what worked for others?
Byrne: We added an "auction" tab in 2003 and we had a really nice social media - almost a Friendster-like - feature within the community. I've always liked social media. I'm by nature a classical liberal, which is what some people today would call a libertarian - sort of a small "L" libertarian - and to us the whole social media angle really conforms to my understanding of how the world really works. We oppose centralized, hierarchical centers of power and authority, and believe in decentralization. So the whole 2.0 thing seems very obvious and natural to me.
SMT: Something about this medium speaks to that point of view. Did you seek outside expertise to help you adapt to social media or did you pioneer it on your own?
Byrne: We had some outside expertise. There's a fellow named Judd Bagley who became a 2.0 journalist early on. He gave us a lot of advice and has joined the company.
SMT: Did you jump into this with both feet or did you first run pilot programs and limited rollouts to debug the process before you exposed it to all of your customers?
Byrne: I would say less jumping into it with both feet and more iterative - adding features as we created them to our Community tab, which is very popular with our customers. And once we got the Twitter-Facebook thing we formed a customer service team that monitored Twitter mentions that had any kind of problem with Overstock, we always reacted quickly and got in touch, things like that. Then it just built from there..we keep on adding new features and although I feel good with where we are, I think that there's a lot coming down the pike in the next year for us in terms of social media.
I wouldn't say that we just dipped our toe in the water compared to other companies. I think that we've been real progressive on it. But we see now that we've really just opened a door to a whole new world in which we can get much more aggressive.
SMT: Has this been a smooth process or have you encounted some big bumps since you opened yourself up to public comment?
Byrne: To tell the truth, the technological changes are never smooth and there are things to be worked out, but the things that corporate America was always afraid of with social media have been totally absent for us. It just seems like the communities in general are receptive and grateful that we, as a company, are engaging with them honestly and as equals in the social media space. We're not trying to deflect or distort it, and I can't think of a time when that hasn't been accepted. People might still have their problems with an order or a desk showed up that was chipped or scratched. I think that they're appreciative that we're making the effort to reach them.
End of interview Part 1.