Found on Pew / Internet, a report on how Internet will be in 10 years’ time and how we are going to use it. The good news is that you will officially surf from behind your office Proxy – it’s work time, so what? – and you will all switch to open-source unless you want to keep on giving your money away to counter IP Lawyers.

- The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020

- The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness

- Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020

- Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment

- The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations

- “Next-generation” engineering of the network to improve the current Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch

Not much surprise for Geeks like you but worth a look anyway, you can download the full report here (Via Pew/Internet)

A man in Tianjin had put a deposit on a Toyota Corolla, then started venting on the Internet when the car failed to show up after three months. Given the anti-Japan sentiment that rages in China’s cyberspace, the griping created a big risk for Toyota.

What did this PR firm do ?

The Beijing-based firm spotted the disgruntled consumer’s postings in one of the 500,000 online forums it regularly searches. Before the topic could draw much attention, Daqi put the buyer in touch with Toyota, which pressed its dealer to deliver the car.

So far, so good. Everything ended up gently and smoothly. Such  PR companies apparently won lots of new contracts this past year, when angry bloggers attacked Carrefour, Nokia, Coca-Cola or Mc Donalds. Here is how they do this:

When online commentary turns negative, the monitors assess whether it might flare up. They figure out who’s generating the criticism—an irate consumer, a nationalist teen, even a rival. Then they consider how fast the complaint is spreading, and whether it’s likely to be picked up by Web portals such as Sohu and Sina. “You know it’s a crisis when Sohu or Sina has created a special page to collect all the news articles and aggregate comments,” as they did when bloggers angry about Tibet called for a boycott of Carrefour in April.

PR outfits hire students to write postings that boost certain brands and criticize the competition, says a staffer at a Western PR firm in Beijing. The job description of one online help-wanted ad reads: “Publicize and popularize [products] via online forums and blogs. Send at least 50 propaganda posts per day.” Workers are offered 1.5 cents per post.

Even if most of PR companies say they don’t pay bloggers, they acknowledge pampering online opinion leader, by inviting them at sessions where they can test products or even taking them on overseas trip.

What If…?

Let’s just imagine for a second that we use the same such a nice PR firms to work- not for but – against a rival brand… Let’s imagine that you enroll a few hundred students, who create each another dozen profiles on popular forums and you get an instant task force of thousands of bloggers, ready to hit the Web.

Just spice the whole thing up with a few algorithms to generate some web traffic, bookmark this on popular social bookmarking sites and spread the word on social networking sites… What do you get ? A disaster.

A typical example is how British Airways’ reputation was damaged by employee comments on Facebook, read the full post here.

What to do then ?

Basically 3 steps:

1. Create you online profiles, manage these profiles, monitor the buzz.

2. Optimize your online presence by posting positive comments about your brand before being hit.

3. Engage if hit.

More resources here:

Free Online Reputation’s Management Beginner’s Guide by Andy Beal

Basics Of Online Reputation Management by Lee Odden

34 Online Reputations Management Tools by Andy Beal