FUMBLE: FACEBOOK MESSES UP THE SMEAR CAMPAIGN

This week's perspective from Joe Chidley: We’re all grown-ups here, right? So we won’t pretend to be shocked and appalled that Facebook hired a PR firm to encourage media to talk trash about Google. What's shocking and appalling is how badly the whole thing seems to have been conceived and executed. The smear surfaced after media outlets began receiving anti-Google pitches from the firm, Burson-Marsteller, and blogger Christopher Soghoian exposed them in a tweet: “Just pitched by PR firm wanting to ghost-write an anti-Google op-ed for me. I am quite capable of authoring my own anti-google stuff thank you.” Newshounds and bloggers glommed onto the story, and Facebook was eventually identified as Burson-Marsteller’s client. The campaign was targeted at Google’s Social Circle, a service that lets Google Mail users see information derived from public Facebook data. Facebook didn’t much like the idea, hence the push to get media to write about what an invasion of privacy Social Circle is. You might think that’s good business or bad business - we believe that depends on a number of variables. But what’s unforgiveable is to be so sloppy. Seems to us that the whole thing got off to a bad start with the ghost-write offer. In this day and age you absolutely can’t get away with ghost writing a smear piece. Particularly in social media where “authenticity” is the Holy Grail. You also can’t forget that the other Holy Grail of social media is “controversy,” and what Facebook and Burson-Marsteller managed in this case was to transgress one imperative while serving up the other. Analyst Rob Enderle, quoted by Computerworld, summed up the fumble succinctly: Facebook “realized they needed to do battle – they just misused their weapon,” he said. “Either stop doing this kind of thing, or do it well.” Somebody should get their money back.