Costco, for instance, didn't publicly respond to a customer who complained recently on Twitter that there was a chunk of wood in a muffin she bought there.
The task can be overwhelming. Conversocial, a social media CRM agency, commissioned a study of Tweets made about a selection of retailers over a 24 hour period on Jan. 8. The study looked at 11,732 tweets about Costco, Kroger, Safeway, and Walgreens.
Of those, only 3 percent of tweets carried the "@" symbol that allows
While companies that use Twitter for CRM have sophisticated dahsboards allowing them to know when someone tweets about them even without the "@" symbol, many retailers do not.
Conversocial CEO Joshua March fears that those retailers will only find that something is going wrong when it's too late to stop it from exploding into a social media nightmare. One woman, for instance, tweeted that she had found a piece of wood inside a muffin she bought at Costco — but didn't use the @costcotweets handle. (Gross food misadventures — like the Burger King "feet in lettuce" photo — tend to go very viral, very quickly.)
That tweet, from @Rudycarpente8dl, did not get a reply from Costco:
Omgsh I found a small piece of wood in one of them costco muffins kmt
— Rudy Carpente (@rudycarpente8dl) October 27, 2012
Costco lucked out on this occasion: No one else noticed the tweet either.
Here's a look at some of the other tweets in that 97 percent: