Throughout the week of the International Christian Retail Show (ICRS), retailers were shown how to use social media to cultivate customer relationships. Gunnar Simonsen, general manager of the Christian Supply Centers in the Pacific Northwest, exposed retailers to social media techniques in a variety of settings, including a music marketing workshop and the Retailer Idea Exchange.

Simonsen, who lectured groups of retailers ranging from 10 to 100, said he was surprised to find a low number, 2-3% in his estimation, of stores using social media for business.

"It's always fun when I tell people that the average age of the person using Facebook is 36," he said. "Facebook is free. It's the biggest social marketing in the world, and the average time a person spends on it is three hours. We need to be looking into it."

On Facebook, stores can set up fan pages and create tribes, Simonsen said, even adding video book previews and music previews of authors and artists featured in the stores.

"It's phenomenal what you can do," he said. He also repeated a suggestion from EMI CMG's David Crace, who said that every store has an employee who could easily set up the store on the social networking site.

Simonsen also told retailers how text messaging can be used to offer immediate discounts to shoppers who will then be more likely to return to the store for additional purchases.

Other social media sites like MySpace and Twitter were discussed, the former being credited for a large turnout at one of Simonsen's stores for a meet-and-greet with rock band Demon Hunter. Posting the event on MySpace close to the day of the event, more than 300 people turned out at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon.

"(Social media) is there, it's zero cost, and there are great resources," Simonsen said. "We must not lose sight of our relationships to our customers. There's so much data that we can collect and learn from."

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