By Wendy Marx

The majority of global firms aren’t leading by example when it comes to social media.

Big-name consulting companies like McKinsey and Accenture position themselves as global leaders so you’d think they’d be ahead of the pack in social media.

Wrong.

Or at least my little experiment showed that some of these big fellas have little ears when it comes to listening and responding to at least some social media queries.

To put their social media attennae to the test, I tweeted the following last week to seven of the world’s biggest consulting firms, calling out their respective Twitter names in my tweets:

@bigname consulting company, can you help? Trying to reach someone in PR in US to interview for a story & could use some direction?

Now, I’d like to say my Twitter account was ablaze with all of these heavy hitters’ responses. Instead, I have yet to hear from the likes of Accenture, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company and Booz & Company.

As for the others?

Price Waterhouse Coopers e-mailed me the following day and graciously offered to help.

And a special gold star in social media alertness goes to the aptly-named firm Monitor Group.

In about two minutes after I posted my Twitter query, Monitor.com’s Managing Editor Michael Goldberg called me to see how he could help. Goldberg said he has on his desktop a Twitter client (he declined to say which one) to monitor (I couldn’t resist the word) what’s being said about his company.

I also reached out to Deloitte—both as part of my test and for a content marketing story I’m working on. After the traditional PR route failed with Deloitte (leaving voice and e-mail messages), I turned to Twitter to share my frustration:

@Deloitte, no one ever got back to me & here I was going to praise your PRwork. Left multiple emails/vmails. Can u help?

Around 10 hours later, Deloitte responded and around 17 hours later two Deloitte PR people tweeted me offering to help. And lo and behold the PR department kicked into gear the traditional way e-mailing me and voice mailing.

Well, at least they responded. Just not on Twitter time. A bit of irony for a company that talks up social media:

“In a connected world, power shifts to those most able to connect,” reads a Deloitte document from its Australia practice.

Now, I wasn’t sure if I had unrealistic expectations with these firms so I turned to social media guru Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered.com

“I’m not surprised,” said Strout, when told of my experience.“In fact, I would be pleasantly surprised if these companies were responding. It’s still the minority that are listening and doing proactive outreach.

“Very few companies have discovered the art of conversation, of when to engage and how to react with folks. And B2B companies are less inclined to get outside the box. We’re still at the tip of the iceberg.”

This original version of this article ran on Ragan.com