Just a week ago, I bought the book titled; Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick and have been living in belief that he is one of the most genius people around when it comes to technology. But an old friend of mine strongly believes he is a thief of ideas who rose to fame by applying dirty tactics.
Those were the words of Sarah Harris who works with MOCE, a mobile technology company in UK, when I sought her comments this evening on the latest setback facing Facebook where it has been accused of hiring a PR company to write negative stories about Google in the US media. There is no doubt Google and Facebook’s rivalry is turning out to be one of the biggest between technology companies at the moment.
This is because both are competing for advertising revenues and eyeballs online. At the moment, current indicators shows that Facebook is accounting for an increased amount of time spent by people on the web while Google is said to prioritising on social networking strategy. According to the news, Facebook hired Burson-Marsteller, a PR company to place negative stories about Google in American press outlets.
Since the admission, Burson Marsteller has terminated its contract with Facebook. This is bad news for Facebook, given its attempts at a squeaky clean image and owner facing accusations for stealing someone else idea before setting up Facebook. This evening as I digested the news, what came to my mind was that if Facebook uses such underhand tactics can I really trust them with my data. This has made me wonder when you hear news about hackers unknown making off with personal data where do they get it?
This is pure greediness by Zuckerberg and his team which speaks and he better be reminded that Facebook is just supposed to be an informative online network and we all know it was not structured under Google power. It is a pretty much disturbing situation that Facebook have to hire someone to do the smearing with just the intention of overtaking Google’s add revenue.
In my opinion it’s a big shame to both Facebook and the PR company hired to do the dirty work. Executives from Burson-Marsteller approached a well known blogger urging him to investigate Google’s privacy policy, and in exchange they would help him get the piece published on influential sites such as The Washington Post and The Huffington Post.
Burson-Marsteller said that Facebook requested its name to 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.
Burson-Marsteller added that 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.
When confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman later confirmed that Facebook hired Burson-Marsteller for two reasons. The foremost important was that Facebook believed Google was doing some things in social networking that raises privacy concerns and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.
This story equals a Cold War spy case made public, the PR fiasco reveals and ratchets up the growing rivalry between Google and Facebook. I will be waiting for both companies reactions and predict who will come out winner out this fiasco. For now, my scoresheet reads Google 9 and Facebook 1.

David Kirkpatrick Talks About The Facebook Effect

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