On the heels of Google’s IO event, The Daily Beast reports Facebook hired PR firm Burson-Marstellar “to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.” It is also reported Burson offered to help an influential blogger write a negative op-ed article about the search giant.
Everything blew up in Facebook’s…um…face when said influential blogger outed Burson publicly and USA Today picked up the story.
For its part, Facebook confirms it hired Burson but claims it did so because it feels Google is doing nefarious things when it comes to privacy and because it isn’t happy with Google’s use of Facebook’s data for its own social networking service.
Approaching bloggers, Burson wrote Google’s Social Circle is “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users–in a direct and flagrant violation of agreement with the FTC.”
Check out the rest of the saga here but it really boils down to this; grown adults acting like fickle, vindictive children with no self-esteem who will stoop to playground antics to get their way. And that’s not business. That’s childish.
