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By Matt Pillar, Editor In Chief, Retail Solutions Online/Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

Here's your first co-branded newsletter since we announced the Integrated Solutions For Retailers/Retail Solutions Online merger. This week, we're focused on social networking, which we've been leveraging extensively to communicate the value proposition created by our merger.

Social networking tools are a terrific way to communicate your value proposition, too. Better still, social networking tools enable dialogue with your customers. But many retailers grapple with the execution of social networking as a delivery mechanism for marketing. Its real-time nature is not the least of retailers' concerns. Said one of our subscribers, "We've seen tremendous response to promotions communicated via Twitter, so much so that our stores have been caught off guard by traffic and our inventory position has suffered from unanticipated out-of-stocks."

On October 27 at 1:00 EST, I'll host an SAP-sponsored Webinar featuring Brian Kilcourse, principal at Retail Systems Research. Brian is going to help bring some strategy and structure to this increasingly complex and unstructured social media world. Specifically, he'll shed light on how you can begin to use social networking tools to monitor the voice of the customer, accurately assess customer sentiment, and glean important impressions about your customer service, product assortments, and quality of personnel.

This nascent field of unstructured data created by social networking chatter derives customer sentiment from a myriad of external sources. What many don't realize is that you can assemble this data into meaningful, line of business or C-level insight. Powerful new business intelligence applications enable consolidation of this data and reporting on it, which results in actionable information you can use to improve customer intelligence, product assortment, and promotion planning and execution. I encourage you to register here and join us for the Webinar.

Meanwhile, my best advice is to learn from your pioneering peers. Check out online T-shirt retailer Threadless on Twitter — twitter.com/threadless. With more than 1.2 million followers opting-in to receive its 2-4 tweets per day, can you imagine how effective this $6 million company's Twitter promotions are? Begin following your peers and competitors and study their moves closely. You'll see many of them on Facebook's Fan Pages, which are represented nicely by the Victoria's Secret effort at facebook.com/vspink. The company does an excellent job creating the perception that its Facebook fans are "insiders" with exclusive access to promotions, discounts, and information, and that "exclusive" circle is fast approaching 1.5 million fans.

These initiatives are dirt cheap or free to leverage, and while they won't be effective for every retailer, the social networking demographic is a dynamic and rapidly expanding one. Join our Webinar on 10/27 to learn more.