Being the most frequently visited site isn’t enough for Facebook, recently the social networking giant made efforts to discredit Google through a negative media campaign.
Facebook publicly admitted they hired the Burnston-Marstellar PR agency to begin a campaign to smear Google over privacy issues. Facebook believes Google uses data from their website in order to develop their own social-networking tool, Social Circle, which is a year old and relatively unknown.
The Burnston-Marstellar agency tried to enlist a blogger who is particularly concerned with user privacy to launch the smear. The blogger, Chris Soghain, didn’t take the assignment because the PR firm refused to disclose the name of their client. Soghain released the emails he exchanged with Burnston-Marstellar to a news site called the Daily Beast, who broke the story.
A few companies, including Apple and Microsoft, were suspected to initiate the anti-Google crusade. Both Google and Facebook have faced controversy over their privacy policies.
The idea that Facebook would start a smear campaign points the power Google yields in the cyber world. Despite the efforts of other search engines like Bing to remove them from the top, Google plays a vital role in the technology sector.
Google is the number one search engines and is most often used by SEO optimization firms. In SEO optimization, Google gives these firms the opportunity to reach more potential consumers than any other search engine. Social media like Facebook can be used to reach clients, but only 30 percent of their users are in the US, for this reason SEO optimization relies more heavily on search engines.
