On January 29, a large number of followers (including me) were dropped from Whole Foods corporate Twitter account. I was curious as to why this happened and what was being done about it.

I looked at the Whole Foods timeline and saw that the company was attributing it to a Twitter-generated glitch. I contacted Whole Foods via email, and Winnie Hsia, online community moderator, told me the company had sent Twitter a “Support Request (#16647) to address the issue … and shortly afterwards a Twitter staff member notified us that they were aware of the problem and currently investigating it.  At their request, on Feb 2nd we gave them a handful of user names of some of the folks who were unfollowed.

@WholeFoods did not respond to my questions either on the public timeline or by direct message, so I contacted the company’s PR people via the web site and received Winnie’s courteous and reasonably prompt reply.

I also exchanged emails with Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, in an attempt to find out what happened. He confirmed that there was a problem with the account but said it “was a cosmetic glitch on the number displayed on their profile page.” When I pointed out that I was among those unfollowed by Whole Foods the morning of the 29th, Biz said “I’d have to look at that as a separate issue.” I asked him on February 5 to confirm the root cause of the problem, but have not heard back from him.

I would love to hear something like “we had a corrupted database which has now been fixed” or “during the migration to newer faster servers, about x followers were accidentally dropped, but we are able to quickly restore them.” I think Twitter users, both companies and consumers, would feel better if the company owned up to the occasional IT problem and talked openly about its resolution.

Here’s why I think this all matters to businesses on Twitter. If you’ve been on Twitter for any period of time, you’ve experienced or heard tell of serious IT problems. In general, these have improved a great deal, and high marks to Twitter for improving availability and response times, and for smooth sailing during high load events like the Consumer Electronics Show when people tweet like crazy. Still, features like search and direct messaging get switched on and off or have limited functionality as Twitter IT people try to keep the Millennium Falcon of social networks running.

Where else do we tolerate so many IT problems? If a company like Salesforce dropped a few hundred contacts from a company’s CRM system, people would be really upset. Web 2.0 companies like Twitter should be held to similar standards.

I say similar, because I realize Twitter and Salesforce aren’t the same thing, but I also think the argument that “Twitter is free, so you should be grateful it’s there and stop complaining” doesn’t hold water. It isn’t free. Companies invest time, resources, opportunity costs and reputation by establishing and maintaining a presence on Twitter. This presence results in the creation of often huge numbers of connections (people who follow the company, people the company follows) which in turn increases Twitter’s valuation. So it’s not cash, but companies are not participating on Twitter for free.

Obviously, situations like this put companies in a difficult spot. In assuring me that Whole Foods values its Twitter followers, Winnie told me:

“We believe strongly that Twitter is a unique channel, allowing us the opportunity to listen to and respond to our customers, fans and critics in a way not afforded to us through other channels and we would certainly not intentionally shut down any of those voices.“

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE Twitter. It’s one of the most powerful and amazing communications tools every conceived. I just think it still needs some clean-up and a little more professionalism before it’s viewed as a serious (and reliable) business tool.

Tags: Twitter IT problems, Whole Foods, Winnie Hsia, unfollow, unfollowed, Biz Stone, @WholeFoods