“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.

Daqi referred the issue to Toyota’s corporate headquarters, which then pressured the local dealer to speed delivery of the car. Toyota was able to defuse the situation before it drew attention from other web portals that reach millions of readers across China. By finding that one disgruntled customer – and assumedly scores of others – Daqi is enabling Toyota to stamp out smoldering issues before they negatively affected their brand. Hopefully they’re finding plenty of positive commentary too that they can encourage and magnify in order to build support among online consumers.

It’s great to see new efforts by companies to pay attention to what’s being said about them in online chatter. On a broader level, we’re encouraged by how mainstream it has become for corporations and other larger organizations to pay attention to online audiences and listen to individual consumers.

As this trend continues to take root and becomes the norm, it will be interesting to see how smaller teams attempt to tackle the volume of online chatter. It's one thing for Toyota to do it, but keeping a firm on retainer to watch your online commentary is prohibitively expensive for most small companies. Daqi's country/regional specialization is one approach we'll certainly be keeping an eye on as a promising method for small companies. Breaking things down geographically is a great way to keep track of a conversation in a manageable way and lets organizations maximize the impact of limited resources by focusing on key areas.