Facebook Admits Hiring PR To Degrade Google
Facebook, the world’s largest social networking giant has admitted that it hired a Public Relations agency to create negative publicity about Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). However, Facebook’s PR personnel denied that this was any sort of smear campaign to ruin Google’s reputation.
The news about Facebook hiring a PR agency to spread negative publicity about Google was leaked on Wednesday by the PR agency Burson-Marsteller. The agency was hired to bad-mouth the Social circles feature launched by Google, to various news outlets in Untied States.
Initially Facebook denied the allegation by Burson-Marsteller about the bad mouth campaign against Google, however later Facebook accepted the allegations by justifying its actions. A Facebook spokesperson said that the agency was not hired to ruin the reputation of Google or to run a “smear” campaign against the company. The spokesperson said the PR agency was only authorized to let third parties to verify themselves that users did not want Google Social Circles to gain their information from their Facebook accounts to use on other services. The spokesperson said that the PR agency was specifically asked to focus on the already available information from media to be independently verified. The spokesperson said that they did a mistake of not being more transparent about their motives, since the issues are serious.
However, the Google Social Services feature by Google does nothing to raise a privacy concern that Facebook could have raised a huge cry over. It is just a feature that connects various accounts such as Twitter, Blogger, LinkedIn, Facebook and Flickr. The service shows the various connected users directly and via their friends. The same information is also available thought a easy search on Google, but the information is found in an easily usable way here.
Facebook justified its actions by saying that it wanted people to judge Google Social Services privacy concerns on its own and did not want to run a smear campaign against Google. It said that It did bot go public with this because it feared that the issue was not legitimate.
The PR agency that leaked the reports, Burson-Marsteller also released a statement that since Facebook has agreed to running such a campaign, they too can say that they ran the campaign against Google. It also said that the agency earlier withheld the name of Facebook on their request. The campaign run by Facebook could be easily replicated by any other agency which is monitoring the media.
