Today the Daily Beast’s Dan Lyons — aka the fake Steve Jobs — detailed a plot by Facebook to smear its biggest rival, Google. The plot, if you even want to call it that, was a simple, time-tested one: Facebook hired a big PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, to pitch anti-Google stories to members of the media, specifically, in Lyons’ words, “urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.” (Burson’s CEO, by the way, is Mark Penn, who may just be the most improbable success story in American history, seeing as though he’s reptilian and kinda bad at everything he does, yet still manages to fail upward time and time again — but that’s neither here nor there.)
Writes Lyons:
For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.
The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”
But who was the mysterious unnamed client? While fingers pointed at Apple and Microsoft, The Daily Beast discovered that it’s a company nobody suspected—Facebook.
Really, Dan Lyons? “Nobody” suspected Facebook, even though any half-ass tech industry observer would know that it’s been out there for roughly a year that Google’s developing a social media platform that’s been described time and time again as a “Facebook killer?” Had I received emails from a PR firm trying to coax me into writing anti-Google material, Facebook would have been the first company I suspected. The only other companies I would have even considered would have been Yahoo and Microsoft.
But even more surprising than Lyons’ assertion that “nobody” suspected Facebook, is the moral outrage the revelation has sparked among media and tech people. I mean, really? Have we all become that f*cking naive?
Brooke Hammerling, one of the top tech industry PR professionals out there, even appeared somewhat taken aback, tweeting, “Really Facebook? Really Burston Marsteller? Really? I mean….come on.”
Have people forgotten that Google and Facebook are two of the biggest, most powerful companies in the history of the world, who just so happen to be in direct competition with each other? Have people forgetten about the long, sordid history of corporate espionage that coincides with the rise free market commerce. There have been countless books, some of them utterly fascinating, written on this subject. Do people think Coke and Pepsi have never tried to secretly smear each other? Or Ford and GM? HAS NO ONE SEEN MICHAEL CLAYTON?!
By the way, this is Facebook we’re talking about here. Facebook. People hate Facebook, though they can’t seem to quit it, and you know why? Because Facebook is slimy and shady, that’s why! And the slimy and shady starts at the top with Mark Zuckerberg, a man whose biopic came with the tagline, “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” The fact that Facebook is slimy and shady and poll after poll shows that people tend to, you know, hate it because it’s slimy and shady, is the precise reason Google decided to make a “Facebook killer,” which in turn is the precise reason Facebook is looking to take shots at it, specifically in the realm of most people’s main gripe about Facebook — that it sh*ts on the privacy of its users.
And if that’s not enough, I think by now most people who work in media, at least the ones who write about Facebook on the regular, realize that the company employs a pretty aggressive in-house PR staff who work diligently to cultivate a positive image for the company. I’ve written about Facebook quite a bit in the past, and anytime their PR people interpreted something I wrote as anti-Facebook, which was most of the time, I would get an email from someone explaining to me how I was wrong and bias and unfair and blah, blah, blah. The only in-house PR firm I’ve come in contact with that’s more aggressive than Facebook’s is Fox News’ team. Seriously, those people are a den of vipers.
“Hey Brett, I’ve got a tip for you…You’ve heard about all those hookers being murdered and dumped on the beach near New York City, right? Yeah, well we have it on good account that Rick Sanchez may have done it, and there’s a possibility that Keith Olbermann is helping his pull it off.”
That is barely an exaggeration. Not only will they unleash the hell-hounds on you if, God forbid, you write something remotely derogatory about the network or its staffers, but they also aggressively pitch stories that are harmful to their competition at CNN and MSNBC. Even better, they always do it in phone calls — they never, EVER email so that there’s no paper trail. They’re evil geniuses, those people. Read some of John Cook’s reporting on Roger Ailes if you don’t believe me.
So again, this should come as NO SURPRISE to any of the many smart people freaking out over this as if Mark Zuckerberg’s been caught on tape drinking the blood of Larry Page’s puppy.
Now, there is a silver lining to all of this — the frustratingly brilliant Alex Blagg penned a satirical op-ed titled, “Google Is Stupid and Evil, But Facebook Is Awesome” in response to the uproar, and it’s hilarious.
He writes:
Both companies are formidable juggernauts who cast long shadows over the digital landscape. And when it comes to searching for stuff and driving traffic to my SEO-enriched “content farm” crops, Google is great. But now they’re trying to play around in the “social networking” sandbox, and have launched a new product called Social Circle that is manifestly evil and threatens our privacy to its very core. So how, exactly, is Google planning to destroy our lives with this new feature?
Man, Facebook is awesome. Sometimes I’ll be poring over family vacation photos of some girl I met at camp this one time when I was fourteen, and I’ll realize that I’ve blown almost an hour just hanging out and consuming content in this fun, casual, not-at-all threatening environment. Facebook is basically the master of Social Networking—that’s why Hollywood made a movie about it called THE Social Network. They should be the only ones, because their intentions are pure and they would never do anything to hurt us.
Perfect. Almost as perfect as the Zuckerberg note pass meme. Almost.