the 1 Percenters

In the age of the internet, information can trade hands infinately faster than it ever could have prior. For marketing purposes this created an entire new platform to acrue data and promote products that just about any type of company could offer. However there is one form of marketing that these companies can't quite put their thumbs on and manipulate. This is of course the user generated content on the internet, in the forms of blogs, that are created through such sites as: http://www.blogspot.com/, http://www.flickr.com/, and http://www.digg.com/.
Through these bloggs people can write reviews about products and services that they feel strongly about, for better or worse. These everyday joes(citizens) hold a unique power in their hands to write about how these products and services actually function rather than hearing it from the associated companies. These "1 Percenters" only do this for a hobby and get their nickname from the fact that only about 1% of the people using a product or service will actually generate their own web based opinions about it.
This fact interests me, as a marketing major, I am curious to see how this will affect business quality control or if it will increase the creativity of the marketing campaigns in an attempt to manipulate what is posted on bloggs such as these. If anyone has ideas about how this could affect retail and service industry I would be open to hear about it.