Eden Prairie, Minnesota based SuperValu, Inc. [NYSE: SVU] is the third-largest food retailing company in the United States. Founded in 1926, the company has a market cap of $1.61 billion.

Social Media's Relevance in the Retail Industry
I would say my perspective for media is relevant especially for a company which has a close relationship with customers. We got full connection with the customers. It gives us the
opportunity to provide services for them in real time. So you do not have to call to complain manager, you can post the complaint, we can see them and respond to it immediately when there is an issue or even more importantly when we have a chance to have real time training opportunity or to give delivery. We provided the application to our customers to make their shopping experience better. We think about what marketing used to be, it was very generic. We used to send out the marketing merchandise to everybody in a certain zip code. Social media gives us an opportunity to give specialized specific marketing and discussion that's very different for you and it would be for me based on my current needs.

Social Media at Supervalu an asset and not a Potential Threat

From my super value perspective, a social media strategy is all based on our marketing strategies which is aligned with the IT organization to ensure that we can deliver what our customers need. So we try understanding customers better and ensure that we are building the platform that will make it different.

Maximizing Cost efficiency for IT

Delivering high security services is one of my passions. It helps to think of delivering security from the service perspective. Having a great security platform allows you to protect information and customer data in privacy of their conversation and allows you to have a higher sincerity to the customer. Looking at security projects in the same manner as looking at business applications, they need to be justified. All of those things need to be looked at as benefits, as there is cost saving and productivity that you can derive by giving security upgrading project.