No industry is more susceptible to the fickleness of consumers than retail. One day, a retailer could be on top with the latest gadget or fashion trend and the next day find their most loyal shoppers have been lured away by the competition. Despite millions spent on marketing promotions and advertising, nothing is more powerful than word of mouth. And these days, that happens most often through various social media channels. If a retailer wants to take the pulse of shopper's desires, wants, needs, and perceptions to be able to predict future trends and be ahead of the game, they need travel no farther than Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
In today's constantly changing marketplace, retailers are realizing the positive and negative impact that social media can have on their brand. However, even the most savvy social retailers rely on brawn, i.e. employees with eyes "glued" to computer monitors to read and react to tweets, blog posts and online conversations. This approach not only causes eye strain, but also is manual and time consuming and does not always align with a retailer's overall business or shopper relationship strategy.

Building shopper trust and loyalty in a market that is more technically savvy, global, and diverse will require adding a brain and central nervous system to the traditional brawn. Such central nervous systems are enabling retailers to more strategically and proactively tap into social media channels and use them to their advantage. At the very heart of this challenge is a more intelligent use of data to understand changing shopper needs, preferences, and interaction styles; to develop products and services that address these changes; and to create marketing, promotion, pricing strategies and campaigns that target these offerings to the shoppers for whom they were designed.

To help close the gap between a retailer's social enterprise strategy and its execution, retailers need a portfolio of business software applications that facilitate better shopper insight, enhanced operational efficiency, and greater business flexibility. Together, these IT solutions can help a retailer leverage its social enterprise for greater financial visibility, leaner operations, superior value, peak workforce performance, and profitable sustainability.

The ability to manage every aspect of the shopper experience helps a retailer's new social enterprise connect more effectively with shopper communities. By capturing and categorizing real-time online comments into an easy-to-consume dashboard (by products being discussed, geography, etc.), and discerning whether a response is warranted (based on an individual's level of influence), an integrated solution automatically triggers actionable next-steps for real-time decisions on marketing campaigns, promotions, customer service, inventory, etc. Making this view available to sales representatives in real time can help them provide the advice and support shoppers expect today.

In addition, integrating social media intelligence with enterprise marketing processes helps retailers respond quickly to new shopper needs and expectations. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution integrates front- and back-office processes, helping increase cross-selling and up-selling giving sales personnel more time for shopper interaction. With a CRM solution, comments made in the social media realm can be funneled through a retailer's system as context into a shopper's history. Such functions can generate a sales ticket automatically prompting the appropriate line of business to engage individuals when required, whether it's to resolve an issue, provide new information, or distribute loyalty rewards. On the flip side, retailers are immediately alerted to and can capitalize on negative comments being made about a competitor by quickly issuing coupons or other incentives to disgruntled individuals.

The ability to successfully manage every aspect of the shopper experience requires a unified IT architecture that brings information together for better use across the enterprise. While a silo approach can provide initial value, multiple "best of breed" solutions can hamper organizational effectiveness as the social media enterprise matures. What's needed is a comprehensive, flexible, and readily extensible industry-specific business solution that can grow as a retailer grows to help ensure its sustainability. Robust analytics for analyzing shopper data captured in the social media realm are also of paramount importance. This requires a consistent strategy for managing master data that a retailer can collect and summarize from information gathered across Web channels, call centers, e-mail contacts, and face-to-face interactions.

The possibilities are endless in this brave new world for retailers ready to capitalize on the social media phenomenon to stay at the forefront of the competition and clearly demonstrate to their shoppers that they come first.