Keeping Up With Posts and Tweets Down East

WHEN the phone rings at a call center inside a former department store here, it’s as much story time as sales time. As in: I was in Maine four summers ago. What’s it like in the winter? Or: Our dog ate my husband’s favorite slippers. Can you help me replace them before he finds out?

As the holiday orders pour in, some 3,600 L. L. Bean employees in this old mill town and elsewhere in Maine work the phones, answering questions, taking orders and, quite often, listening to warm, fuzzy stories. Customer service is a hallmark of this venerable Maine retailer, which turns 100 next year.

But this Christmas season, there’s a new twist: in addition to traditional phone orders, L L. Bean is wading boot-deep into social media. A 10-member team was recently created to interact with customers on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The changes, however, have come with a few corporate qualms that test the company’s folksy small-town culture. Will all that chatter help or hurt the company’s image?

“We are quite used to dealing one-to-one with our customers, but this takes it to a whole new level,” said Terry Sutton, a senior vice president for e-commerce at the company.

For one thing, Ms. Sutton said, “people will be airing their gripes to a bigger audience.”

Indeed, a quick search of Twitter and Facebook finds plenty of examples that might make Ms. Sutton cringe.

“Just spent 20 minutes flipping through the L. L. Bean catalog looking for black people and minorities,” wrote a Twitter user named Mary Tyler Moreno. “Think I counted three.”

Another user, who goes by John Martin, joked that L. L. Bean had shrewdly instigated the Occupy Maine protests to spur sales of tents. “Kudos to @LLBean on coming up with @OccupyMaine. Genius viral marketing campaign to sell last season’s tents!”

Not surprisingly, some complaints are directed at the company’s ubiquitous catalogs (up to 50 separate titles a year), which Bean has been mailing for generations.