With the first big hurricane of the season touching down today, I knew we'd see some interesting news coverage. As I was scanning the chatter about Hurricane Dolly over lunch, a tweet by the Red Cross caught my eye.

My first reaction was, "the Red Cross uses Twitter?" I followed the link to its blog covering Hurricane Dolly. Although neither the blog nor the twitter feed is a great source for breaking news, I found it very interesting where they were directing folks to get updates on the storm: to the Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube feeds mentioning the hurricane from the public at large. Read more »

We’re still following what’s happening with FISA, and we saw some interesting trends today. Look at the difference in coverage of FISA on different mediums.

Here’s at look at the number of posts about FISA on Twitter over the last two weeks.

You can see that there was more chatter about FISA on Twitter yesterday than at any point over the last two weeks. That’s a different story than what you see when looking at coverage from mainstream news sources and blogs.

Here are the stories about FISA picked up by Google News over the last two weeks:

And here are the blog posts about FISA picked up by Technorati over the same period: Read more »

“Even one negative consumer comment online can end up influencing many customers.”

That’s a quote from Zhou Chunlan, CEO of Daqi, a Beijing-based reputation monitoring service recently profiled in Business Week that has gone to work for several multi-national companies helping them manage their online reputations in China. One of Daqi’s key services is to help pick up potential crises before they turn into public relations disasters. In the booming Chinese economy, one person’s grumblings about customer service or a faulty product can have a huge effect on a company’s success there.

A few months ago Daqi noticed a disgruntled Toyota customer posting on Chinese product message boards about his negative experiences with the company. He had put down a deposit on a Corolla more than three months ago and was still waiting for the car to be delivered. Read more »

Yesterday Alex Steed posted a great article about a discussion he and Eric had earlier this week about online strategy, aggregation, and Managing News. One area they talked about was the impact listening in - and acting on - online chatter is having on companies. They also hit on some interesting points on how listening to what others are saying online creates a more holistic overall online approach, which in the end of the day, leads to better strategy and outreach.

You can read the whole article here.

This morning I finally had some time to look at what people were saying about Rootscamp DC on the blogosphere (and Twittersphere, of course). Last week before the conference got underway, I had set up a group on Managing News to track all mentions of Rootscamp happening online, so I just went there to see what news had come in.

I noticed a few interesting things about the coverage: Read more »

• About half of all the mentions of Rootscamp were on Twitter. This makes sense since Twitter tends to pick up users and twittering frequency around conferences and it was one of the hottest tools discussed in the sessions I went to. But that makes me a bit surprised it didn't amount to more of the coverage of Rootscamp.