A brief interlude for a new group of readers –

Greetings New York Times Business Section readers, and welcome!

You are joining “in medias res” First, Noam Cohen did a good job of summarizing the story so far. There are a LOT of issues in this story that you might care about. You might wonder, what does this mean to me? How does this impact MY business? What should I do? Well first things first. Get educated.

If you have a business and don’t have a blogging policy, get one. Not just for you but for your EMPLOYEES. Two great guides are the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s legal guide for bloggers and blogger rights. If you are at a senior level, you probably know guidelines on stuff like this, but for all the average joes out there, they probably don’t, help ‘em out. Believe me, nobody enjoys getting a cease and desist letter from a multi-billion dollar corporation for Christmas (I really wanted a pair of Homer Simpson underwear and a watch). You help them understand the issues, you will help yourself.

Next. Since this is coming from the business/marketing section you might be thinking, “How can I USE the blogs?” or “How can I Protect myself AGAINST the blogs?” Bloggers are people. So if your first impulse is to USE people and to FEAR people then that will inform your choices. I would suggest trying to UNDERSTAND the people who write these things so you can interact with them. It’s not hard, read a few of them, because often they are your customers who WANT to be heard. They are crying OUT to be heard. They will tell you things like, “Hey, you are hurting your own brand by associating with this violent talk from this radio program. Check them out, it doesn’t seem to be what you stand for as a company.” And then you can decide. A lot of smart VPs of Marketing like the ones at Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America and Border’s Books listened, and chose to operate in a way that simply reflected their own internal values. It seems logical to me, but you would expect that from a Vulcan in a fedora.

There are lots of other lessons here, including ones about fair use and abuse of copyright. But to get personal for a minute, I think we all have a responsibility to protect the people who have a hard time defending themselves. Even powerful journalists are people to, and they have been attacked for YEARS from the right, and sadly, it shows. Bloggers on the left want journalists to do their jobs because it is important, on the right they want them hanged. That is a fundamental difference and one you should all notice.

There are a lot of bullies in the world and we all know that powerless feeling of being bullied. How you wish that someone would help you but you didn’t want to “tattle” because the bully will beat you up HARDER after you tell. Well that is what happened to me. But I had a few friends who helped. And for your business you might want to consider, are we supporting bullies? Does that reflect OUR values? You can say “it all comes down to numbers” but the listeners are people, they aren’t numbers, and if you listen to THEM, they will tell you what they think. As my friend Ellroon said about these “Hot Talkers” on the radio:

[bloggers and citizens] are so sick of this sense of entitlement, this arrogance of power, this conspiracy to yank the country to the fanatic, non-thinking fearful right just to gain a bit more power, a bit more money, a bit more control.

Enough. Americans are not Nazis. We are not hateful, intolerant, greedy, and stupid. We are not going to be told we are.

Thanks for listening.

LLAP,
Spocko