Gail Nelson
An experience the BurrellesLuce Marketing team shares with many other marketing and public relations professionals is the task of figuring out how to serve our clients and our business goals through social media. As we continue to get our feet wet through hands-on experience – this blog is one tactic, as is Facebook and microblogging – we also listen and engage our audience through research. The goal: create a social media roadmap for the future.

What’s clear right now is the Marketing department simply cannot do it alone. (Is anyone else hearing the song, “I Can’t Do It Alone,” from the movie musical Chicago, in their heads right now?) Colleagues from the Sales, Client Service, Media Measurement, Content Management, and Technology areas are among the contributing authors to Fresh Ideas. Additional BurrellesLuce staff members, including myself, are active on Twitter.

Lately, some tweets hit close to home. Here’s one story I’d like to share: This month’s invoice stuffer (produced by the Marketing department) was devoted to our “green and easy” initiative – where we ask our clients to forgo paper invoices in favor of emailed statements. Promoting a green initiative via a print piece didn’t quite mesh with one client. The client, we’ll call her Mary, tweeted that she had opened her bill to find a color invoice stuffer on fairly heavy stock suggesting she go green. “You first, BurrellesLuce, you first,” she said.

Because we constantly monitor and listen to various social media outlets, we found Mary’s tweet quickly. I used data from our CRM system to phone her (Twitterers: I couldn’t send her a direct message because she wasn’t one of my followers) and introduced myself as senior vice president of Marketing. I thanked her for sharing her concerns, and relayed how our mailing equipment malfunctions if we use lighter-weight paper. As more clients accept email bills, our plan is to cease mailing altogether and gain the environmental benefits listed on the invoice stuffer. I also encouraged Mary to contact me in the future should the need arise.

Within a few minutes of our conversation, she tweeted her thanks for the phone call. I follow Mary on Twitter now, and she follows me. Engaging in these types of conversations can be a little frightening at first, especially to non-millennials like me raised on the command-and-control battlefield of corporate communications. But with each interaction, we learn more about our clients and prospects and the value of social media. “You first” challenges are both easier for me to accept, and more rewarding.