War against China's Blogs

          Since the Internet allowed so many emerging new businesses to enter the market with a unique business model, one company in China is now successfully carrying out its value to its clients. Daqi.com is a Beijing-based firm which looks for the comments or posts from more than 500,000 online forums that might affect crucially to certain business or firm and try to reslove the problem that those consumers have before anything gets worse.

          Since Daqi.com is the first to provide such service, they charge firms from $500 to $25,000 a month to seek out for those influential comments on the web so they could effectively manage the brand image. The CEO of the firm states that even a single negative comment can end up influencing the entire industry.

          When Daqi.com finds out those kind of postings or comments, they first figure out whether it is influential or might flare up. And then they determine who are behind of the criticism and what they are trying to get from it. When the information is collected, they also concider how fast the complaint is spreading on the web.

          Many other similar businesses are jumping into this market; they often hire college students to write positive comments or create false comments on the competitor's products or service, which can be concidered as unethical. One the other hand, people who are hired for such job gets average of 1.5 cents per post.

          I think when companies use this kind of method to create a keen relationship with its customers can significantly increase the loyalty towards the company, and therefore, acquire greater market share. However, the problem that I'm worrying about is the ethical issue that it would face in many cases if it is used for a wrong prupose. Sadly, China is often concidered as one of the most unethical countries in the world for providing poor quality of good and services, and for having many pirates on the web. I hope firms like Daqi.com would become a leading company in China to change this kind of perception and help the right Internet business models to be settled in the market.

Reference;
Roberts, Dexter. "Inside the War Against China's Blogs" BusinessWeek. June 12, 2008.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_25/b4089060218067.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories

20601008 - 14th Entry