We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced -- it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.

Google is fooling itself if it thinks that the move to Hong Kong will in any way ease the tensions between the search giant and China. Sure, under the convoluted "one country, two systems" arrangement in which China exerts sovereignty over Hong Kong but allows it is own nominal autonomy, Google may be technically correct that it is "entirely legal" to serve up search results in simplified Chinese characters (the preferred writing system in mainland China) on topics such as the Tiananmen massacre, Tibet, and Taiwanese independence, but symbolically speaking, the strategy is sure to be seen as a yet another obnoxious Western affront.

Hong Kong! Territory seized from China by Britain after the end of the first Opium War -- which itself was a direct result of the East India Company's determination to sell as much opium to Chinese consumers as possible, against the direct wishes of China's rulers. If Google wanted purposefully to adopt the mantle of the Britain's most notorious symbol of colonially arrogant capitalism, it could have done no better than to announce it was setting up shop in Hong Kong, there to broadcast its search results to all and sundry.

I don't want to be misunderstood here -- I am not equating search results with opium, (although some days, after a long day of hitting the search button, one can feel dulled into a narcotic haze). I don't buy the theory that uncensored search results imply an indoctrination in Western values that is similar in heft to extraterritorial conessions. I think Google has the moral authority here and China is in the wrong, which is not something I would ever say about the English presence in East Asia in the 19th century. What surprises me is that Google could imagine that this was any kind of a solution to the stand-off. Given the fact that China already sees the entire dispute in the framework of unwonted Western interference in Chinese domestic affairs, the company's decision to move across the border to the site of one of the most egregious historical embarrassments for China is unlikely to go over well.

With a panel of banking CEOs arrayed in front of him, Neugebauer asked why we just don't "let the market work these things out."

The issue at hand was what to do about all the "toxic assets" weighing down the books of the big banks. Just the day before, Treasury Secretary Geithner had disappointed the world by failing to deliver much in the way of specifics during the ballyhooed rollout of his plan to confront the problem. Neugebauer appeared to be suggesting that the best strategy would be to do nothing. Just let the banks take their lumps, and if they went bankrupt while the market worked things out, so be it.

My guess then was that if Citigroup or Bank of America had been forced to acknowledge the true market value of their mortgage-backed security assets and related derivatives at that juncture in time that they would have collapsed immediately, a la Lehman Brothers, and the financial crisis would have entered a new and even more disruptive stage. But we'll never know. Interestingly, the whole toxic asset issue seems to have been finessed for the time being; whether that's because Geithner's stress tests helped build confidence, or because of a more general relaxation in panic, I'm not sure. But it still seems to me coming so soon after the nation watched mostly deregulated markets drag the entire global economy into a severe recession,  the very question, "why don't we let the markets work these things out?" is one of the dumbest things any Congressman said during the entire debacle.

It's good to see that Rep. Neugebauer is, if anything, consistent.

One could take this data to mean those who argued that the new law of the land is a corporate sellout to the pharmaceutical industry were correct. Lobbying organizations such as PHARMA and the American Medical Association supported the healthcare reform bill because they were confident that their businesses would not be harmed. For some Democrats, that reality leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

But an early Wall Street Journal summary this morning makes a more pertinent point. (Italics mine.)

Companies ranging from hospital operators and pharmacy-benefit managers to drug and device makers are expected to profit from the bill, which will enroll more people in insurance programs.

More people will have health insurance as a result of the bill passed by the House of Representatives Sunday night. That's good for the health of real people, as well as for healthcare industry profits. The stock market -- which so many conservative pundits have told us lives in terror of the Obama "agenda" -- is reflecting this reality so far, with all the major indices trading up by mid-morning. Progressives who wanted a public option are disappointed. But how much worse must be the disappointment for the conservatives who are denouncing reform as pure evil, when they look at the news, and realize, hey, no big deal, the market isn't all that upset at the end of freedom?

Nestle, for its part, has issued a half-hearted public statement declaring its "commitment to using only 'Certified Sustainable Palm Oil' by 2015, when sufficient quantities should be available."

At this juncture we have something like a perfect match: a grandstanding and easily over-excited environmental organization facing off against a multinational company with a long history of ethically questionable business practices. And orangutans!

Enter Facebook. Nestle has a Facebook page, and until this week it was a quiet backwater. But on Wednesday, defenders of the rainforest and its orangutans began to visit, illustrating their profile pictures with various clever permutations of the Nestle logo -- "Nestle Killer" -- and making a series of mean comments about the company. The powers that be weren't pleased. At 11:26 p.m. Thursday night, the moderator of the page posted on the Nestle Wall:

To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don't post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic -- they will be deleted.

To anyone who has spent more than five minutes on the Internet since 1994, the ensuing reaction was entirely predictable. Rage. Anger. Nasty comments. An acceleration of rampant logo abuse!

Most Internet marketing veterans would likely have just folded up their tents and headed for the hills in the face of an angry online mob. You can't win that kind of fight. But this moderator refused to back down. He (or she) did exactly the opposite -- breaking every rule of corporate public relations ever made. She (or he) was, horror of horrors, rude. AN UNSPEAKABLE VIOLATION OF EVERY HOLY COMMANDMENT IN THE BOOK OF CORPORATE P.R.!

An excerpt of the ensuing dialogue:

Paul Griffin: Hmm, this comment is a bit "Big Brotherish" isn't it? I'll have whatever I like as my logo pic thanks! And if it's altered, it's no longer your logo is it!

Nestle: @Paul Griffin - that's a new understanding of intellectual property rights. We'll muse on that. You can have what you like as your profile picture. But if it's an altered version of any of our logos, we'll remove it form this page.

Paul Griffin: Not sure you're going to win friends in the social media space with this sort of dogmatic approach. I understand that you're on your back-foot due to various issues not excluding Palm Oil but Social Media is about embracing your market, engaging and having a conversation rather than preaching! Read www.cluetrain.com and rethink!

Nestle: Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.

Darren Smith: Freedom of speech and expression

Nestle: you have freedom of speech and expression. Here, there are some rules we set. As in almost any other forum. It's to keep things clear.

Paul Griffin: Your page, your rules, true, and you just lost a customer, won the battle and lost the war! Happy?

Nestle: Oh please .. it's like we're censoring everything to allow only positive comments.

Cue the backlash. Jennifer Jones at SpeakMedia:

... [C]oncerned consumers, backed by GreenPeace are trying to engage the brand online about the issue and some placed altered versions of the Nestle logo on their profile pages as a form of protest...and the company's crisis communications response is to post nasty insults? Insane.

Rick Broida at BNET Insight:

It's PR 101: Don't insult your customers. And in PR 2010, mind your manners in public forums -- especially those expressly created for fans of your company! It may be true that there's no such thing as bad press, but there's definitely bad social networking -- and this is a prime example.

And of course the "fans" went wild. For the past 24 hours, Nestle's Facebook page has been a branding nightmare. The moderator himself has gone mostly silent, except to change the welcoming message on the page to "Social media: as you can see we're learning as we go. Thanks for the comments."

And this:

Nestle: This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologise. And for being rude. We've stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude.

It's a sad sight, to see a man (or woman) broken by the taunts of an angry mob. But what I find most confounding about this whole sorry display is that the real error here was for the moderator to act like an actual human being. Most corporate public relations is about smoothing all rough edges away with the goal of creating an essentially false version of reality, full of comforting jargon and meaningless buzzwords. Exhibit A: Nestle's official statement on palm oil. Many of the commentators on this Facebook fracas are saying that Nestle should just have kept reiterating what was in that statement and avoided riling the crowd. But what's the point of simply pushing regurgitated pap? How can that be considered good manners? It's managed discourse that means nothing, and I think it's far more degrading to the chances of real communication between corporations and consumers than the damage done by one person who shows his annoyance at a bunch of people who imagine that they are engaging in some form of meaningful social protest by posting complaints about a company while sporting juvenile profile pictures on a Facebook fan page.

Don't get me wrong -- I think the whole concept of fan pages for corporations is stupid to begin with, and I think Nestle has done some truly vile things in the course of its existence on this planet. But I gotta say I'm kind of loving the nameless gal (or guy) who had the temerity to tell his (or her) critics "Consider yourself embraced." That was real! That was awesome.

He or she will never make that mistake again, of course, and that just contributes to our greater social detriment. Because if we are going to use social media to its fullest capacity, it should be to help us make real connections between people -- not to attack them when they reveal their own humanity.

But Wal-Mart charges much less per transaction than its most notorious "fringe banking" brethren, which encourages Matthew Yglesias to see the giant retailer as offering a welcome alternative to the competition.

If you're cashing, for example, a $1,000 biweekly paycheck then $6 is almost one third the price MoneyGram is asking. Nothing too earth-shattering about this, but it underscores the point that a lot of the time the best solution to abusive business practices is to find ways to get competing firms into the business.

In other words, don't try to regulate the bad payday lenders out of business, just encourage the kind of relentlessly cut-throat competition that will inevitably drive prices down.

Ryan Avent follows along:

This just continues to illustrate how interesting Wal-Mart is as a phenomenon and a mirror of American society and culture. Wal-Mart clearly has market power, which it occasionally uses abusively, if not necessarily illegally. But sometimes, it uses its market power to accomplish things government entities are unwilling or unable to accomplish -- pressing environmental standards on its suppliers, for instance, or reining in abusive lenders. I just appreciate Wal-Mart's ability to demonstrate the strangely ad hoc way in which American institutions manage to muddle through. Americans should maybe be taking Wal-Mart's market power a little more seriously, but hey, so long as its ability to shift the economics in local markets accomplishes goals a dysfunctional federal government is unable to address, well, it may be better to leave well enough alone.

You might almost wonder if labor unions and other anti-Wal-Mart activists were wrong to (successfully) oppose Wal-Mart's efforts in 2007 to become chartered as a bank. Retail banks were worried about ruinous competition, but maybe society would benefit if usurious money-lenders came under some pricing pressure.

But there's a dark side to this story. One driver for Wal-Mart's expansion of financial services is the growing pool of Americans who need such things as same day paycheck cashing.

From the MediaPost:

Walmart's "target market is both the unbanked and underbanked population," Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com, tells Marketing Daily, "and that is also a growth segment, particularly with recent legislation that makes it more difficult for consumers with poor credit to get credit cards, and the potential for reduced availability of free checking. And that population seems poised to continue growing."

Italics mine.

Maybe it's a good thing for Wal-Mart that the pool of people who appreciate its low prices -- whether for check cashing or for shampoo -- is growing. And clearly it's a good thing for poor people to have access to cheap consumer goods and financial services. But it definitely not a good thing for the country, in general, that Wal-Mart's customer base is burgeoning.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom's own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

The Financial Times reports:

A person close to Viacom claimed that virtually all of the roughly 63,000 video clips the company found on the service were unauthorized, with the number posted by employees or agents working for Viacom only in the "hundreds."

 

(UPDATE: Corrected to reflect the appropriate gender for Zahavah Levine.)