Google and Facebook are kind of like brothers: Cain and Abel. Which one is which I’ll leave to your imagination and taste, but there’s no doubt that these two groups aren’t big fans of one another. There was a time when they were two lonely giants who couldn’t care less about each other (they rarely crossed paths), but with Facebook now assisting with Bing search results and Google having its go at social networking, that peaceful time is over. Need proof? Take a look at Facebook’s recent action of hiring PR firm Burson-Marstellar to spread anti-Google stories.
Yes, I know, it sounds a little “spy vs spy” for the world of modern business, but this isn’t just a rumor: when confronted with evidence on the matter, a Facebook representative acknowledged that Burson-Marstellar had been hired, and had been hired for the sake of spreading stories accusing Google of infringing on user privacy with “Social Circle” (a Google feature that takes a look at user connection to get information for Google’s social search).
Of course, the justification given was that Facebook had some concerns about how Google was treating user privacy with social circle and the fact that Facebook data seemed to be part of the information scrape, meaning that Google could be siphoning off some social data from Facebook for their own social projects – even beyond the social search elements. That plus the fact that Facebook has very intentionally and visibly not partnered with Google on social search projects (favoring Bing instead) may be legitimate causes for resentment.
But planting stories? Well, that’s another matter. Still, if I were with Google, this wouldn’t upset me. Quite the opposite. There’s no reason that Google shouldn’t be ecstatic about Facebook hiring a PR firm to ruin Google’s reputation, only to have that effort backfire completely. While Facebook was trying to instill distrust in Google through some fabricated stories, what they really accomplished was building distrust in themselves using stories from the real world.
That’s probably the reason that Google hasn’t made a statement on the subject. Anything said now will make them come off as either a whining victim or a vindictive punk. Google’s silence seems to be the best PR option: it lets Facebook suffer from the negative media attention without Google ever having to raise a finger.
[via Google Watch]
