Social shopper media firm Collective Bias may have been founded in Walmart’s home town of Bentonville, Ar., but the firm has big plans to help suppliers to Target achieve their social media objectives.

Despite nearly half of shoppers using social media every day, less than one-fifth shop through them, according to a new study by PwC.

Beauty brand L'Oréal USA is leveraging Clarabridge, a provider of sentiment and text analytics for customer experience management, to monitor what is being said in real time about its 27 brands across social media outlets, including website reviews, product reviews, blogs, Twitter and Facebook.

You can learn a lot by monitoring consumer conversations in social media. It can predict political elections, the Oscars and even the next reality show winner. If you are a CPG marketer, social media can also be a real-time predictor of your new product’s success.

Retailers are now well familiar with social media as a means of engaging consumers, but may be less familiar with using this means of interactive dialogue to engage employees. And, yes, even those employees out on the sales floor. Why is employee engagement so important? Because profits are important.

Social media has transformed the way brands connect with consumers, which is why anyone interested in the future of retail owes it to themselves to spend at least a few minutes combing through the registration statement Facebook filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week in connection with a planned public stock offering.

Increased localization of shopper marketing efforts at Walmart is now possible via Facebook following the retailer’s announcement that it would create approximately 3,500 store-specific Facebook pages to serve its nearly 9.5 million fans.

Not sure why parents of a newborn would want to share images of their child with throngs of people gathered in Times Square or motorists in Los Angeles, but in these celebrity-obsessed and digitally-enabled times a lot of behaviors defy logic.

Be that as it may, Target devised a novel brand-building campaign that allowed parent to essentially share images of their baby with a universe of complete strangers as opposed to the more discrete tradition of limiting viewings to family and a close knit group of friends.