Question of the week: Politics and your business

[JoeSorge]

A quick question about politics with the prevalence of the OWS movement in various cities across the U.S.
It's a pretty straight forward one: Is there a place for it in your business?
I've always been one to stay as far away from any sort of political affiliation or discussion as part of our businesses and I'm curious if you have the same beliefs.
What sort of benefit could there be? Is there only a downside?
What say you?

[simoncmason]

I don't think there is any place at all for politics in business - I can't see any benefits but, I can see plenty of downsides and even HR related legal issues that could arise.

Be interesting to see if anyone is political in their business life and how that has helped them.

[shelmke]

As a former journalist, I've been trained to keep away from political topics in business. I always had to be unbiased. It's even one of my taboo topics in my social media networks. I think that politics (like religion) is a personal issue and doesn't belong in the work environment.

The only time in recent history that I've touched upon politics is when Jim Raffel and I used it as a topic for our "She Said, He Said" venture.

Here's that blog post from May: http://jimraffel.com/2011/05/16/on-political-conversations-in-social-media-shelby-says/

[greg]

Politics IS my business! You're all better off. I used to have a hairline.

[JimRaffel]

What's politics?

Honestly I used to put it out there a great deal more which side of the fence I'm on. Since working with Shelby (go up a few responses) I've greatly reduced my use of social media and my blog to talk politics. As divided as this country is right now, all I can hope to accomplish is pissing off 50 percent of my audience.

As a B2B marketer the different groups like Tea Party and Occupy don't even interest me as demographic groups. If I was in the B2C space I'd probably spend time trying to understand what motivates these folks and makes them tick. There are probably buying behaviors that can be uncovered in that information.

[raulcolon]

I guess it becomes much easier to talk about politics when so many people want Puerto Rico to become independent. Being a colony is an issue that is hurting many small business owners who normally are my target audience.

But I try to keep more on My personal blog than when talking about business.

I guess in my case people know what my wishes are but I don't really identify with a political party!