You and Your Stupid Politics

If you are reading this post, it means my beloved The Sales Blog is back online after being taken down by Anonymous. Apparently, they took down Go Daddy for supporting SOPA and similar anti-freedom legislation.

Earlier this year Anonymous hacked Stratfor, a global intelligence company whose services I subscribed to, and stole my credit card. I’ve heard Anonymous uses your credit card to make charitable donations, but that’s not what they did with mine. They see Stratfor as helping serve forces that they oppose.

A few weeks ago, Chick-fil-a managed to make it into the news by sharing their opposition to same-sex marriage. They drew a lot of opposition from people that support same-sex marriage and a lot of support for their beliefs from people that share their view. They believe they have a religious duty to oppose same-sex marriage.

Because this blog is important to me, I now want to switch hosting providers. Go Daddy’s political decisions are interfering with my business decisions. They made a political decision to support SOPA, they were vocal about their support, and I believe they even threw some money behind that support. They lost a lot of customers for making that decision. Now they have to live with the consequences of that decision as businesses that want their sites to remain up come to understand that Go Daddy is a target.

I have written this warning a couple times. But I’ll repeat myself since we are getting close to another Presidential election.

You are free to support whatever political party or candidate appeals to you. You are also free to support whatever cause you believe deserves your support. You are even free to share your opinions with the world here on the Internet, on the back of your car, or when you are sitting across from them in meetings.

But you are not free from the consequences of your decision to publicly share your politics.

Some people will support your opinions. Other people may buy from you in spite of disagreeing with your opinions. But some people won’t do business with you because of your political opinions. The more political you are, the more you will offend people that don’t share your politics.

No one will know your political opinions unless and until you share them. If your politics have nothing to do with what you sell, you aren’t obligated to share them. You aren’t changing anyone’s mind about their political beliefs, but you might be changing their mind about buying from you.

Be political if you want to, but be thoughtful and be careful. There are people counting on you.