One of the memorable messages from this year’s Local Shop Summit was about the power of Social Media. John Stanley said that in a Facebook and Twitter world businesses have just one hour to respond to a negative comment.

This week my Retail Newsagent didn’t arrive in the post until Tuesday so I took a photograph on my iPhone and tweeted a message to @RetailNewsagent. I got a reply apologising for the delay, but as I wasn’t complaining about their service I decided to respond and included @RoyalMail in the conversation. I was amazed that they responded within 6 minutes. As you can see from the Twitter messages @RoyalMail asked about the postal class that @RetailNewsagent use for their subscription mailings and advised on the service level expectation. At the end of the conversation @passionfinch added that he never gets his copy before Monday.

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I know from twitter comments that I have posted about @Sainsburys not only do I get responses, but they also take actions.

Are you on Twitter, FaceBook, Google + and LinkedIn?  If you are not you are probably unaware of comments that your switched on customers are making about you. As John Stanley said in Torquay if you haven’t joined the Social Media revolution you won’t be hearing negative comments that your customers are making about you. But their friends will be.

Better Retailing retailer, Jai Singh knows about the importance of the Internet and Social Media. A good place to start finding out how it can help you is to look at his FaceBook page  and because his Twitter address, @SinghsPremier is linked to it you can see how he uses this as well.

Retail Newsagent is running a 10 week series on Social Media written by some of the Better Retailing team.