“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 »

After the earthquake hit yesterday, a big red dot appeared over China on the Managing News dashboard map that dwarfed all the other dots around the globe. Next to it in the tag cloud, I saw a few new terms in red that I knew were probably related to the China story, and I started clicking to learn more. I quickly learned that Sun Weide is the Olympic spokesperson giving updates about the changes in the Olympic torch relay plans due to the earthquake, and that the construction project at the Three Gorges Dam wasn't affected. But who was Ronen Medzini, and why was "cellular telephone" showing up as a relevant term?

It turns out he is an Israeli student in the Chengdu area who sent a text message to the AP after the earthquake: "Traffic jams, no running water, power outs, everyone sitting in the streets, patients evacuated from hospitals sitting outside and waiting."

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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 »