Facebook admits hiring a PR firm to bad mouth Google

SOCIAL NETWORKING GIANT Facebook has admitted that it hired a PR agency to plant negative stories about Google in the media, but it denied that this was a smear campaign and said it should have done things differently.

Yesterday news broke that Facebook allegedly hired Burson-Marsteller, a top PR group, to bad mouth Google's Social Circles feature to a number of news outlets, but initially Facebook refused to comment on the affair. Now the social network has revealed to The INQUIRER that the reports are true, and it tried to justify its actions.

"No 'smear' campaign was authorized or intended," the Facebook spokesperson told us. "Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles - just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.

"You and your readers can look at the feature and decide if they have approved of this collection and use of information by clicking here when their Google account is open: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social. Of course, people who do not have Gmail accounts are still included in this collection but they have no way to view or control it."

We tested out the Social Circles feature and couldn't find anything of great privacy concern. The feature shows connections between people and the various web sites they use, including Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Blogger, and, let's not forget, Facebook. All of this information could be found through a Google search, but it's automatically collected into an accessible format. Some people might not like it, but it's hardly any more worrying than Facebook's own services or standard Google Gmail.

Facebook also told us that it didn't want its name used by the PR firm because it wanted people to judge the privacy concerns on their own merits and not as a competitive issue between Facebook and Google. It said it the secrecy about the PR tactic was not because it was scared or that it didn't think the issue was legitimate.

Facebook wasn't the only one with regrets. Burson-Marsteller issued a statement, which read:

"Now that Facebook has come forward, we can confirm that we undertook an assignment for that client.

"The client requested that its name be withheld on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light and such information could then be independently and easily replicated by any media. Any information brought to media attention raised fair questions, was in the public domain, and was in any event for the media to verify through independent sources.

"Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle."

The question is why it took on the assignment in the first place if it was against its policies. Was the allure of Facebook as a client too much to say no to? Was Burson-Martsteller really willing to risk its reputation for what was clearly a dodgy practice from the start? It certainly seems so, but then no one ever plans to get caught in situations like this.

On one hand both Facebook and Burson-Marsteller try to defend their actions, but on the other both admit they should have done things differently, recognising that this approach was the wrong way to go. We cannot help but wonder if they would be saying this if the planted stories had gone ahead without anyone noticing.

Christopher Soghoian, the researcher and blogger who published the PR emails to the web, told The INQUIRER, "the PR company didn't want me to publish their op-ed on my blog, but sign my name to their op-ed to be published in a major paper." This adds another element to the story, as Burson-Marsteller was even pushing to write the Google-bashing articles itself, but have top journalists and bloggers append their name.

Google remains silent about the incident, most likely lapping up the fact that it looks like the victim of the sinister plotting of Facebook. It seems to us that Facebook set out to damage Google's image, but it backfired so spectacularly that it now has to contend with a damaged image of its own, and we don't think hiring a PR agency is going to fix that any time soon. µ