Tomorrow's Business Today
The Company that is above PR
We are at the beginning of the end for Facebook, argued Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer yesterday.
She has previously observed: “If you’re not terrified about Facebook, you haven’t been paying attention.”
Certainly, the pressure on it from whistle blowers and others is intense and there is now widespread agreement something must be done.
Facebook won’t fix itself, says Time magazine, for example.
I hope Cadwalladr is right, but at times Facebook still feels immune to criticism.
It operates almost as an affront to both the hack and flak industries. It doesn’t care what hacks think and doesn’t seem to do traditional PR at all.
Typically, stories critical of the company end with “Facebook had no comment” or similar.
If there are brilliant PR people within Facebook, fighting to be heard, sympathies to them.
But it seems to think it is above PR. Maybe that more than anything may be its undoing.
Lastly. Facebook’s trouble comes as newspapers seem to be upping their attempts to be friends. We applaud our Facebook “likes” and imagine there is money to be made from this, somehow.
Even if this were a savvy commercial decision (it is not), I wish we wouldn’t do it.
Press release of the day
A good Freedom of Information request here from VPN Overview asking about data breaches from county councils.
Overall, there were 33,645 of them in the last five years, with Hampshire County Council the worst offender.
It is not clear what we should conclude from this, but it’s a good start for a wider story.
