Facebook has been caught hiring a well-known PR firm to plant anti-Google stories in the media.
Both Facebook and the PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, admitted Thursday to trying to get journalists and bloggers to write negative articles about Google's privacy practices. The move comes as competition between Facebook and Google has accelerated over the past several months.
The Internet was abuzz with the news that Facebook undertook what many industry analysts and commentators are calling a surreptitious smear campaign against one of its competitors.
After bloggers and news reports disclosed the connection between Burson-Marsteller and Facebook, Facebook on Thursday sought to downplay the public relations impact of its behind-the-scenes strategy.
A Facebook spokesman said the company didn't authorize or intend to run a "smear" campaign. "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 spokesman said. "The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way."
A Google spokesman didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, a Burson-Marsteller spokesman said Facebook "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."
Still, he added that doing so was "not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined."
Goldman and Mercurio knew what they were doing apparently, and weren't going for any rinky-dink publication -- they aimed for widespread distribution and suggested the story be pitched to Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call or the Huffington Post.
It got worse Tuesday when USA Today revealed that Burson had repeatedly pitched it a similar story, and blasted his efforts following research that much of the claims pushed by Burson's representatives were false.
In the end, is Google's Social Circle ripping off Facebook? Not really. As Lyons points out, what the site is doing is much like what it already does with Google News. Facebook data would be aggregated and presented in a similar manner under a "secondary connections" function.
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