PR 101

Bloggers note: I am aware that sometimes typos show up in the blog. I lost my proofreader to a better job. Please have some patience. No one should ever edit themselves. I do appreciate when any of you points out a typos so I can make a correction.

An interview with City University of New York Associate Professor Jeff Jarvis on National Public Radio last week actually made me pull my car over so I could listen carefully and take notes. He was talking about the French Prime Minister’s Nicholas Sarkozy’s suggestion that governments regulate the Net.

While I normally confine my blogs to marketing, public relations and social media, Jarvis reported on something that could affect all two billion Net users worldwide. So I felt I had to write about it. We all need to stand up, take notice, and in my opinion, oppose any effort by any government attempt to control the Web.

Jarvis is the university’s director of the Interactive Program and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Among his many accomplishments, Jarvis is a national leader in the development of online news, blogging, and other forms of collaborative journalism, blogs at Buzzmachine.com and is the is author of the book, What Would Google Do?

In short the man is an Internet expert.

Prior to the regular G-8 meeting, Sarkozy held an “e-G8” meeting to which the German news site Der Spiegel said he invited three of the world’s most powerful Internet luminaries to a forum in Paris: Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, the world’s largest search engine; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head of Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking site, with more than 650 million users; and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Many other Netizans, including Jarvis, went to the event.

Incidentally, note that the power trio is all Americans.

The gist of Sarkozy wants to do is having governments control the Internet. In his view, governments have a legitimate right to regulate the Web as they are only representatives of a country’s cititzens. He argues that things such as child pornography and terrorism have to be dealt with by governments.

“More than three years ago, Sarkozy declared war on the Web,” Der Spiegel reported. “At the time, he referred to it as a “Wild West” and characterized it as an ‘extralegal zone.’ In the style of an Internet Napoleon, he announced his intention to ‘civilize the Internet.’ Since then, he has pursued regulation with nothing short of missionary zeal.”

Curiously, I saw no coverage of this in the U.S. media. I guess they were too busy eating canapés and hobnobbing with dignitaries to notice something this important.

Jarvis said he attended the meeting as an Internet citizen.

“The net is also a new society,” Jarvis wrote in a Huffington Post blog. “That idea is confounding to nations of laws because the net’s own sovereignty depends upon no one having sovereignty over it. That is how it was designed. That is its core principle.

“So it doesn’t behave like a new land that, in Sarkozy’s view, needs civilizing.”

Sarkozy’s argument about crime on the Internet is, in my view, a Trojan horse. Once government can regulate any part of the Net, it will try to regulate it all.

That’s why we has marketers should be worried. Many countries are particularly protectionist. Suppose you have a client based in Ireland that wants to market its products in Singapore. But for whatever reason, the government of Singapore decides it doesn’t want the Irish marketing in their country. If they can control the Net, they can block any attempt by that Irish company to market its wares. Do you want a government telling you how you can market?

Give a government official control of the Net and free access to information will end. Frankly, I think governments are worried that the Internet is causing them to lose control. If they cannot control the sources of information, they have less control over their people.

Think about the Arab Spring. It was pushed and helped by the Internet. Think about what China and other repressive countries would do if their efforts stifle free expression were granted legitimacy.

We all need to oppose what Sarkozy is doing. He says he is just trying to help.

I am not a big believer in anyone offering to help me if I don’t ask for it. As Henry David Thoreau said: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

Here’s a scenario for you: you are a businessman from another state, or perhaps another country. Your company is doing enough business in a particular U.S. state that you feel you should open a facility there. So, you fly in to check things out. You land in the state within the last month – the peak of the elections season.

In your hotel that night you turn on the television. For the next three hours, you see political invective spewed of that electronic box. The ads you see tell you how bad the business climate is in that state – poor education, high crime, high taxes, lousy facilities, and a government that doesn’t care. You know it might not be true, but you figure why take the chance? So, you pack your bags and go looking for another state to locate your facility and the jobs it will bring.

Too far-fetched? I wonder.

I live in Wisconsin. We are one of the key states in the 2010 election cycle. Our governor’s office is open. Republican Scott Walker is slugging out with Democratic Tom Barrett. Our incumbent senator, Russ Feingold, is fighting it out with newcomer and businessman Ron Johnson. Plus, there are several key races for House seats and the state Legislature.

We in Wisconsin are being inundated with television advertising, most of it negative. Let’s leave aside the personal attacks the candidates are making on each other. I do have say that if these candidates were five-year-olds, they would be sent to their rooms for the tantrums they are throwing.

The majority of the rest of the advertising talks about how bad things are in the Badger state. Our taxes are too high, our healthcare costs too much, our education is system is falling apart, and there is too much government regulations. Both sides say if the other side is elected, Wisconsin has roughly the same change to prosper as the Titanic did to float after it hit that iceberg.

As I said, if you are a businessperson, would you put your company here after seeing those ads?

It bothers me when one of our own does this. If I am that businessman, I am going to tend to believe the people who live here. If they tell me things are bad, who I am to argue?

Plus, if you are like me, you are cynical about any elected official’s ability to accomplish anything. So why take the chance that things might get fixed?

What particularly frosts me is the outside groups coming in and ripping my state. These are groups run by people who cannot tell you why Wisconsin loves the Packers so much, or what the difference is between a six-month-old cheddar and a six-year-old cheddar. The closest they have ever come to the Dairy State is when they land at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to change planes.

They don’t care about Wisconsin, its business climate and what they might be doing to it. All they care about is winning. Once the election is over, they are going to forget about us until 2012.

Everyone involved in the election will justify their tactics by saying what they did is for the greater good. They remind me of the Army officer during the Vietnam War who was quoted as saying “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address in 1933, he uttered that now famous phrase: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” What he meant was that what keeping the economy from recovering from the greatest economic disaster in U.S. history was people’s inclination to hunker down.

Unfortunately, I see the same thing happening today, especially with US companies. They are afraid to do anything right now, especially spend money. Their fear is very specific. Publically traded companies only really want to do one thing – please Wall Street. I think that is one of the biggest problems in our country right now. I think it is what is holding us back.

My friends know this is a common rant with me. I think American business pays way too much attention to what some pimply-faced MBA/analyst has to say. How many company’s justify layoffs, or moving a factory by saying Wall Street demands it? Every state in the United States has seen this happen. If some analyst says a company should be make $1 share and it makes 99 cents a share, the stock price is pummeled. The Board of Directors and the CEO both talk about how cuts need to be made to make that $1 a share.

Now the company might be wildly profitable, but that doesn’t matter. It suddenly doesn’t want to spend any money or hire more workers because it has to make that Wall Street imposed goal. In my mind, it is a stupid way to do business.

That’s why three of my favorite companies are S.C. Johnson Wax, Jockey, and Kohler Corp. They are all privately held companies. They can do what needs to be done without having answer to some analyst 800 miles away. I wish more companies were like them.