Burson-Marsteller Digs Itself A Deeper Hole; Deletes Critical Comments On Its Facebook Page

Failures

from the crisis-management? dept

Burson-Marsteller, the PR giant, who is often used as a “crisis management” PR firm for clients undergoing bad press appears to need some outside help in handling its own crisis management. The company hasn’t done a very good job responding to getting called out for trying to smear Google with questionable attacks and ghostwritten op-eds, at the behest of Facebook. The company has sort of but not really apologized, claiming that the smear campaign was not “authorized or intended.” They just wanted people to “verify” the information. Uh, yeah.

And, now it’s gotten worse, as Burson has been caught deleting critical posts from its Facebook page, forcing the company to sort of, but not really, apologize again, and say they’ll reach out to the person who had posted a link to some of the coverage of the company’s Facebook wall, and tell her she can put it back up. The company also tried to brush it off by saying that its Facebook page had been receiving “a lot of profanity,” and that was all they were seeking to delete. That a basic story about the controversy got deleted in the process… well… I guess that’s just collateral damage.

Filed Under: crisis, openness, pr
Companies: burson marsteller, facebook, google