• The Daily Beast, Thursday, May 12, 2011 12:03 PM

In a scandal sure to wound its social status -- if not its bottom line -- Facebook has admitted to hiring a PR firm to plant negative stories about its chief Web rival Google.  "Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired [WPP-owned PR firm Burson-Marsteller], citing two reasons," The Daily Beast reports. "First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google's attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service."

"The explosive revelation -- which will seriously damage relations between the two technology giants, already bitter rivals -- came to light in leaked emails late on Wednesday," the Guardian reports. "This is quite an incredible turn of events, and one that has backfired drastically on Facebook," The Next Web writes. "But the perplexing thing is Facebook really shouldn't need to resort to these type of mudslinging tactics, it's normally desperate companies on the decline that get involved in these sort of shenanigans."

"It's one thing to publicly voice your concern about another company's privacy practices -- Microsoft, Google and Facebook have been throwing jabs at each other for some time now," writes Mashable. "But hiring a PR agent to try to influence bloggers to write negative press about a competitor -- that's a PR catastrophe of the highest degree."

"Secretly paying a PR firm to pitch bloggers on stories going after Google ... is not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly," writes TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. "It's also really, really dumb ... I have no idea how the Facebook PR team thought that they'd avoid being caught doing this." A spokesman for Burson-Marsteller, told the Guardian on Thursday that the assignment was "not at all standard operating procedure" and was against the company's policies. He added: "The assignment on those terms should have been declined."

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