Political targets

The Washington, D.C., bar owner had been signing an online petition to stop legislation to raise the city’s minimum wage when he accidentally tweeted the page from the official account of his pub, the Boundary Stone.

Out of stubbornness, Croke says, he didn’t take the tweet down at first. But he didn’t take into account the controversy it would provoke among Boundary Stone’s followers, who were disproportionately political operatives.

His tweet and the outraged reaction to it became a story in the local press. There were “a lot of labor union folks and mouthpieces and rabble-rousers who started their own petitions to boycott our business until we change our stance,” Croke said.

He didn’t cave, but his tweet ultimately came down, and he did have to spend time patching up relations with disaffected customers and local officials.

“Bars and restaurants aren’t for politics, that’s pretty much the bottom line,” Croke said. “I wouldn’t have retweeted or done whatever I did with that petition again.”

Businesses like Croke’s may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in businesses. And the disproportionate backlash that Croke’s 140-character opinion stirred up is part of the reason: The rise of social media has made it easier than ever to generate mass outrage. That dynamic is one that political groups hungry for media exposure are eager to exploit.

The result is that in an increasingly polarized country, social media are “often a minefield for companies and politics,” said Jeff Rutherford, a public relations consultant. “The current political climate in the U.S. will lead to more companies grappling with political-social media firestorms” and “customers with fervent political beliefs from the Left or Right will continue to try and drag companies and brands into politics.”

The new boycott

While boycotts historically were aimed at getting companies to change some aspect of their operations, today’s activist efforts against companies are meant to achieve goals that have little to do with their businesses.

Now they involve political groups using private businesses as pawns in the larger political battle.

The political group Common Cause, which bills itself as the citizens’ lobby, has had massive success harnessing the power of social media since 2011 to dragoon some of the biggest brands in the world into publicizing its causes.

The group’s biggest target today is one of the organizations that the Left most despises, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a 501(c)3 organization of lawmakers that promotes conservative legislation at the state level, including measures that can be used as legislative models throughout the country.

With help from a number of other groups, Common Cause aims to undercut ALEC by targeting companies that support it.

In September, for example, Common Cause sent a letter to Google executives asking that they cut off support for ALEC, citing what the pressure group referred to as its “extreme agenda” of “denying climate change, defunding public services, curtailing labor rights and opposing net neutrality.”

Common Cause and its allied groups made it easy for even casual supporters to put pressure on Google by posting the letter online, letting followers share it through Twitter, Facebook or email with just the click of a mouse.

Eventually, the groups got what they wanted. Late last month, Google cut off its support to ALEC.

More importantly, CEO Eric Schmidt used the occasion to bash the conservative group. “The people who oppose [climate change science] are really hurting our children and grandchildren and making the world a much worse place,” Schmidt said in an interview with National Public Radio. “We should not be aligned with such people. They are just literally lying.”

Schmidt’s comments were part of a string of victories for Common Cause and the environmental groups that joined in the anti-ALEC campaign, including the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club. They used Schmidt’s comments in their most recent advocacy letter, which asked EBay to follow the example set by Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yelp and pull support from ALEC.

Common Cause President Miles Rapoport compared the campaign to a classic boycott or strike, placing it among “time-honored, multi-century-old traditions. Whether it was labor unions in the 20th century … or whether it’s now public organization,” he said, “I think it is part of political culture. I don’t think social media polarizes it any more than it has been.”

Rapoport added that “there is a rising sensibility among corporations … that they need to be careful about whether they associate themselves with very ideological groups, whether those be left-wing or right-wing groups.”

While ALEC is openly ideological, Google’s involvement with it was not. ALEC worked on issues that would have been relevant for the tech giant’s business, such as state-level telecom standards and antitrust policies. The ALEC programs opposed by outside groups had little to do with Google.

Nevertheless, the company’s relationship with ALEC drew scrutiny in May, when a group of investors filed a proposal at Google’s annual shareholders’ meeting to make it disclose whether it was supporting ALEC and its “ ‘high priority campaign’ to repeal renewable energy standards in states.”

Renewable energy isn’t relevant to Google’s business. But Timothy Smith, a senior vice president at Boston investment firm Walden Asset Management, explained that “we’re looking at things that might raise reputational risk.”

In other words, Walden says its concern is that Google’s involvement with ALEC is controversial enough that it could become a liability.

Smith cited the 2012 Trayvon Martin case, in which a black teenager was shot dead, as an example. At the time, ALEC had model legislation for “stand your ground” laws, which became a big part of the controversy surrounding the shooting. Several companies, including Pepsico and Procter and Gamble, were criticized for their membership in ALEC by groups such as Common Cause.

Stirring up controversy

But critics say investors such as Walden actually want to stir up the controversy that they say they seek to prevent.

The shareholder proposals and the ensuing pressure campaign on social media by groups such as Common Cause are “interrelated and all part of a larger strategy,” says Jim Copland, director of the Center for Legal Policy at the center-right Manhattan Institute. Copland runs ProxyMonitor.org, a database of shareholder proposals at Fortune 250 companies, and says roughly half of all shareholder proposals this year have involved social or policy goals unrelated to stock price.

“Walden is left wing and they don’t like the fact that ALEC is successful at pushing legislation at the state level,” said Copland, adding that “what Walden wants is for the environmental activists to be able to block Keystone XL and for the companies to say nothing. What they want is for environmental activists to push cap-and-trade bills and all kinds of environmental policies and for the companies to say nothing.”

“It’s incredibly coordinated, and it’s an incredibly large movement of political activists,” said ALEC spokesman Bill Meierling. He attributed the coordination among the groups to a broader, growing infrastructure of left-wing groups, including the liberal funders’ group Democracy Alliance and the activist email list Gamechanger Salon, both of which have rapidly become conservative bogeymen this year.

The campaign hasn’t hurt ALEC financially, Meierling said. Instead, he argued, it has boosted activists’ agendas at the expense of businesses and has served “to chill speech and chill debate and exchange.”

No companies embroiled in controversies were willing to comment on the record for this article.

“Companies are citizens,” Meierling added. “They have real value. And it’s really dangerous for the American people and American discourse to be held hostage to activist groups.”

Being a bystander

Staying away from political groups such as ALEC is no guarantee that a company won’t be thrust into the political spotlight.

Restaurants and retailers have become the battlefield in the war over gun regulations, thanks to the efforts of the gun control group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

Self-described stay-at-home mom and pubic relations professional Shannon Watts started Moms Demand Action in Indianapolis in 2012 in response to the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings.

The group, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment, strives to sway businesses without a policy on open-carry guns to ban guns, saying on its site that “private businesses like Kroger have the responsibility to protect their customers when the law won’t.”

With 26,000 Twitter followers and 210,000 likes on Facebook, Moms Demand Action uses its social media presence methodically to stir up controversy around companies.

The group will pick a retailer that doesn’t have a policy on customers openly carrying guns on its premises, as it did with Starbucks and the Kroger grocery chain. Then it asks its members to call, email or tweet the company to ban customers from openly carrying firearms.

Inevitably, gun rights groups retaliate by carrying guns openly into the businesses that are under pressure, a provocation that escalates the controversy.

“What is most interesting to me about social media campaigns like Moms Demand Action is that a Facebook page started by an Indianapolis mom has mobilized thousands of people to call state legislators, has chapters in all 50 states, is making federal and state endorsements, and is running ads for the midterm election cycle as part of their partnership with Michael Bloomberg’s gun violence prevention organization,” said Laura Olin, who ran the social media strategy for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign. “What started online has become an offline grassroots movement that is putting direct pressure on decision-makers,” Olin said.

One communications expert for a major business targeted by Moms Demand Action said retailers are drawn into controversies by activists “because those groups aren’t getting done what they want in the public policy process, which is why our policy is not to get drawn into this debate.” The individual asked not to be identified to avoid further controversy for his employer.

By making it easy for anyone to express an opinion by simply copying and pasting a status or a tweet, he said, social media have increased the power of activist groups to direct thousands of people from all over the country to deluge a randomly selected company with tweets, Facebook posts, emails and old-fashioned phone calls.

On the other hand, the ease of protesting through social media also means any given complaint is less likely to be from an actual customer — arguably the only group that matters.

Furthermore, for any retailer large enough, the communications expert noted, about half its clientele will support gun rights.

As a result, most of the 10 or so companies that have been subjected to the campaign have been forced to deal with an outpouring of anger if they accede to the gun-control group’s demands. But they have not caved in to Moms Demand Action. Instead, as in the case of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, they have simply written an open letter to customers asking them not to carry guns into their locations but also clarifying that they would not ban guns and instead would follow local law.

“In a lot of ways this is just a perception game they’re playing,” said the communications expert, noting the lack of change in actual policy.

“If you go back and look at the policies any of these businesses have implemented, they’re non-policies,” said John Pierce, one of the founders of OpenCarry.org, a website that advocates for the right to carry handguns openly and has become one of the organizers of the response to the Moms Demand Action campaign.

Pierce, a Virginia lawyer, acknowledges that the campaigns have been successful in advocating for gun control more broadly, calling Moms Demand Action “a very effective PR company, for lack of a better descriptor, and they’re very good at spinning public relations using social media. … They’re using that as a way to get people who aren’t familiar with the issues to think it’s outrageous.”

Pierce said he sympathized with companies such as Kroger that suddenly find themselves at the center of a controversy. “They’re trying to sell groceries and make a profit for their shareholders,” he said. “I consider it a very extreme form of bullying for Moms Demand Action to go against businesses that have no interest in these ideological debates.”

Opportunity calls

In addition to outraged phone calls and harsh social media messages, unanticipated controversies can bring opportunities for companies.

When, in 2012, Chick-fil-A Chief Operating Officer Dan Cathy made comments critical of same-sex marriage following reports that his company had donated to several socially conservative groups, a firestorm of controversy erupted. Gay-rights groups condemned the company, and Democratic mayors threatened to exclude the chicken sandwich restaurant from their cities.

However, a backlash from supporters of Chick-fil-A exceeded the original furor. Following former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s call for a Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, customers swamped Chick-fil-A restaurants that August. The company’s sales rose 12 percent that year.

Subsequently, Chick-fil-A underwent an image overhaul as part of a plan to expand outside its traditional Southern base into the more liberal Northeast. But controversy and polarization can be a blessing in disguise, says New England Consulting Group CEO Gary Stibel.

Stibel noted that Republican presidents use Hallmark cards for gala invitations, and Democrats stick to American Greetings. “Whether it’s on smoking, whether it’s on abortion — there’s a brand associated with all those things,” he said.

Stibel, whose company consults for many top brands, said companies could take as many precautions to avoid politics as possible, but ultimately, “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

“If someone wants to get in the newspaper that they were thrown out of someplace because of something they said or did or carried on their blog, they could walk into a church, a synagogue, a public office, a police station, or a Starbucks … and literally force a Starbucks employee to make a decision on something they didn’t want to be a part of,” Stibel said.

“The lesson is that the world moves and good companies are able to understand situations and understand political risk, and adapt,” said Konrad Gessler, a project manager at New England Consulting Group.

Croke, the D.C. bar owner, sounded a similar argument. “Social media it is what it is and it’s a monster, but used correctly it actually makes business easier. … Social media has been immensely helpful to us in growing our business,” he said.

Polarization has become problem

It’s not just a case of thinking that things were better in the good old days. The United States really is more polarized.

The share of political partisans with a negative view of the other party has more than doubled since 1994, according to Pew Research. Roughly a third of Democrats and Republicans see the opposing party as a “threat to the nation’s well being.” New research by Stanford University political scientists indicates that political animosity now exceeds racial or religious hostility in the United States.

Those rising political prejudices have translated into growing partisan conflict over policy, says Marina Azzimonti, an economist who helped create a running index of partisan conflict for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The index, based on newspaper reports on partisanship, “shows an increasing trend since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which accelerated further at the outset of the Great Recession.”

Rankings that measure economic freedom and business friendliness do not take into account the growing polarization, activism and other intangibles that can affect the ease of doing business.

But brands will have to adapt as the rise of partisanship spreads to areas of life that previously weren’t exposed to political strife. Common Cause’s Rapoport said that “wherever a decision-making process lies, we ought to go to that decision maker, whether it’s a private or public decision maker, and try to get a response from them.”

The question is how the public will react to polarization encroaching on everyday commerce.

It may be that consumers themselves will drive the process of polarization. The newly released app BuyPartisan allows customers to scan items and see how much money the product’s company or CEO gave to each party. Conservative shopping app 2nd Vote allows consumers to see which political groups brands gave to, from the liberal Center for American Progress to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Chris Walker, executive director of the nonprofit that runs 2nd Vote, insists he’s not politicizing business but simply responding to groups like Common Cause on the Left that are ahead of the game. “If conservatives still want to go to Starbucks, fine. But they should know they might as well be cutting a check to Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi,” Walker said.