“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 »

A couple weeks ago Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch had a post on social information overload that we really liked - Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise - and Twhirl Isn't Helping. The key part: "I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know."

The issue Erick gets at in his post doesn't have any respect for the kind of media though. With the advent of what seems like a dozen new "web 2.0" social apps every day (I get more beta invites than I know what to do with), the social web that was supposed to help solve some issues with information overload (benefits of trusted relationships, etc.) is now going the way of mainstream media. Too much information and what happens? Erick says in his post he's "increasingly ignoring" it. Read more »