The new thing being passed around the internet is "Google-gate." It refers to a campaign that Facebook supposedly created to smear Google by using one of the biggest PR agencies in the world, Burson-Marsteller, to send out requests for bloggers and perhaps some actual journalists to print disparaging information regarding Google's loose attitude about privacy.
If people think this sort of thing is a new idea or out of the ordinary, they should get a clue. Companies pull these stunts all the time. It's just rare that it becomes a public issue. The difference in this case is that the two PR guys at Burson-Marsteller are actually ex-reporters, new to PR, and obviously less than circumspect.
Generally speaking, something like this would work in a gossipy way. You'd set up a lunch or dinner and you'd surround the reporter with a number of famous people they want to meet. Then you'd drop a few gossipy "bombs" and perhaps ask the reporter why he or she isn't covering this "scandal?" It's very subtle. The meeting may purport to be about one thing, but the real rationale is to deliver these bombs to the targeted reporters.
Then it gets out and the source is not traceable, because there doesn't even appear to be a source. The results are much more effective than this Google-gate mess, which just looks underhanded.
During the OS/2 versus Windows era of desktop computing, Microsoft had some of the best examples of this sort of unsung PR/Marketing when Marty Taucher headed the operation for Microsoft. My all time favorite casual comment from him came one day at some conference or other when I told him that IBM had said something, which I outlined in great detail. Without batting an eye, he said, "They lie!" And that was that.
Some years later, Microsoft did get into an embarrassing situation when Edelman took the reigns of its PR machine and tried to begin some phony-baloney Astro Turf campaign and was caught red-handed. A few more gaffes happened and the company ended up on the bad side of the PR coin and has been marginalized ever since. After its heyday 1980s and 1990s, the PR at Microsoft has been dreadful and the results show in the price of the stock.
As far as the Facebook involvement in this Google situation, I do not blame Facebook. This was a PR botch that I'm sure Facebook had little to do with. Someone from the agency came up with the bright idea to "educate" the public about how crummy a competitor's idea is. So that person tried a stunt instead of doing it head-on with a normal old-fashioned comment from the Facebook CEO or a press conference where the CEO or even a marketing guy publicly says that something stinks.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that most agencies today put too much faith in social media and think it's cool to attempt to manipulate social media.
The results of attempting to manipulate social media becomes Google-gate, and it makes Facebook look like creeps, hanging out in dark alleys, trying to smear the competition because that is the only way they can succeed. Good work!
I've seen this happen all over the place. Almost all the big agencies—all of which I should mention are now controlled by two large conglomerates—have bought into the idea that social media is the yellow brick road to modern publicity.
For one thing, they think that bloggers are easier to manipulate. In this case, for instance, the idea was to convince a blogger to write an op-ed for USA Today. In the olden days, the PR firm would ghost write an op-ed from the CEO, and it was all out in the open about what was going on. There is nothing underhanded about that concept, except the cover-up of the fact that the CEO can't really write.
I mean, any publication in the world would be giddy to print an op-ed with a Mark Zuckerberg byline. They'd be lining up.
This new approach is laughable and will lead to this sort of fiasco over and over.
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