Do no evil, but at least get a lobbyist
Thursday, April 6, 2006
I wrote recently that while Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Google was the darling of many investors, the company had failed to make it into one particular velvet roped-off area – Wall Street analysts Standard & Poor’s generally respected choice of the nation’s top 500 companies. Well now there’s been a reversal. Google is IN the magic circle at last - as of March 31st.
But at the same time, Google is sliding down the scale of popular admiration. The search engine company with the unofficial but widely-quoted motto “Do no Evil" has had its collaboration with oppressive Chinese authorities held up to public disdain.
And there are mixed feelings about it first resisting, and then moving a bit to compromise with, the US Justice Department’s efforts to get information about users who might be googling for child pornography.
Now it’s doing what many a corporation does when it’s got an image problem. It’s hired lobbyists in Washington DC, including the 18 year-old firm Podesta Mattoon, which has neat connections with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and the DCI Group which is led by a former aide to troubled former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
Investing in a professional presence deep within the capital’s Beltway is probably wise. And it may buy Google more friends among politicians … but among the internet-using public at large? I doubt it.
THE COMMENT OF VENTURE CAPITALIST Keith Benjamin, from the Levensohn partnership in San Francisco, didn’t surprise me when he offered his simple explanation for the way big media companies are currently scrambling to buy internet social networking services.
He said they are out to “recapture the audiences they are losing at an alarming rate".
Corporate giants like Rupert Murdoch of News International certainly understand the need to staunch the hemorrhaging of their audience, even if they don’t quite comprehend the nature of their new competition, which is often very cheery and not even primarily profit-driven. The New York Times made me laugh out loud when it described the anxieties of Murdoch and Viacom’s boss, Sumner Redstone as amounting to fear of “death by smiley-face".
Murdoch paid $580 million for MySpace.com, the decidedly perky network used predominantly by teens – and the race is now on to capture Facebook, the favorite of college-aged men and women. Some analysts, including Business Week, say it could be worth $2 billion. That’s an extraordinary number – and it’s very hard to say what it’s based on.
Nobody even knows exactly how many young people use Facebook – but the Wall Street Journal reports that “the vast majority of students at many college" maintain Facebook home pages, checking in to those pages - like two thirds of all Facebook users do - at least once a day.
Not a bad advertising target – by anybody’s measure.