Online Public Relations Thoughts

This article on the fragility of the iPhone was news to me. It wasn't to my daughter. She told me two days ago that 3G iPhones were having trouble, so she didn't want one. For an eighth grader who doesn't read tech publications to know that is scary. It means she and her friends passed around information gained from the internet long before it reached traditional media. If that is happening among the young, what is the future of reputation management? It has entered an era in which the concept of "management" is nearly fictitious. Even with careful online monitoring, companies can hardly move fast enough to respond. So far, Apple's sales haven't been seriously damaged by the problems, but there is at least one girl on the East Coast who won't have anything to do with iPhone.