PR Company, Internet Marketing

Facebook slip up – hiring a PR agency to do your dirty work

Oh Facebook, what have you done?

We don’t always like what competitors or others in our industry are up to and most people tend to accept and embrace these difference. If everybody agreed about how to go about things then it would be very difficult to differentiate one company from another and nobody would get very far as everyone would be mediocre. However, whilst most people might have a brief moan or crack mild jokes in private about competitors, it seems one internet company took things to a whole new extreme.

It emerged last week that Facebook had hired a PR agency to place negative stories about Google in the world’s press. The PR agency’s strategy involved quietly approaching online security bloggers and promising them their findings would have a spot in prominent publications after suggesting that they look into Google’s privacy practices. Why would Facebook sanction this?  Because by their own admission, Facebook has privacy concerns regarding Google’s practices. As you can imagine, many bloggers and commenters scoffed at this response due to Facebook’s own practices that have led to many users making their profiles invisible to anyone who isn’t already a friend and opting out of Sponsored Stories amongst other perceived violations. Some people have deleted their accounts all together due to privacy concerns, although these people are very much in the minority.  Although, it seems as though the real reason that Facebook has got so uptight is because Google’s Social Circle pulls in content from Facebook directly and Facebook very much wants to keep it’s stronghold on prime social advertising space. With all these difficulties in mind why on earth would a well-known and well-respected PR agency get involved?

The PR agency at the centre of the mess is Burson-Marsteller, a top US public relations firm. They have been running for almost 60 years and have an impressive corporate blue chip portfolio. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be handling the disaster very well, they deny that their campaign was a smear campaign against Google but a campaign to “bring publicly available information to light,”. Considering Facebook’s position, some feel that the response was a semantic argument and the intention was there to cast a negative light on Google. Not only that, but Burston-Marsteller have been caught deleting negative comments on their company’s Facebook page. Surely a PR agency would be able to manage their own PR crisis! This story is very much an excellent case study about how a PR agency should not conduct themselves.

Nobody wins in this story, least of all Facebook and the PR agency who foolishly took on the job in the first place. Hopefully the industry has learned from this that we should act with respect towards our competitors and that there is little place for cold war spy techniques in public relations today, particularly with blogger outreach programmes where bloggers have nothing to lose and everything to gain from blowing the whistle on PR agencies who act unethically.

Do you think this PR agency acted unethically? See the comments section below and tell us what you think.

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