Another Google Executive Joins Facebook

By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek Tue May 6, 6:54 PM ET

It might be argued, however, that Google isn't as transparent as Schrage suggests. Consider the grumblings by telecom companies that Google only bid in the 700 MHz auction to trigger the FCC rules it wanted for the backroom deal-making in which Google engaged to derail Microsoft's bid for Yahoo.

One area where Schrage saw a difference in Google's public relations strategy was in the demands the company makes on its PR practitioners.

"There's a communications strategy where the communications people just answer the phone and dial up and read from a script," said Schrage. "And that just can't work in an environment where the messaging is so decentralized. There's been some incorrect information about the sort of people that we're hiring, suggesting that we don't want to hire PR professionals. But that's of course not the case. But what it does say is we need people to be as effective on strategic development, on messaging and clarity as on tactical execution. So we really need people who can be truly effective business partners, whether it's a product manager, whether it's a lawyer on litigation, whether it's a government relations official on government relations issues ... we need people who can really be effective strategic partners as well as experts on the tactics of execution of doing a blog, reaching out to journalists, preparing video, that kind of thing.

"The speed of public discussion, the complexity of public discussion, and what I think of as the inevitable decentralization of decision making that the Internet creates for all organizations means that those people responsible for serving as the interface between the external world and the internal world need to have tremendous skills and talents that they didn't need to have five or 10 or 15 years ago," said Schrage.

In other words, Google applies the same rigor to its PR hires as it does its engineers because the complexity and speed of today's world demands more than a canned response.

Asked about formative experiences at Google, Schrage explained the moment he realized that Google was unknowable.

"Around the Consumer Electronics Show in 2006, when Larry Page was speaking, there was a whole series of rumors that there was going to be the Google PC announced at that event," said Schrage. "I think what it was ... was that Larry was going to be doing a demo of the $100 PC that Nicholas Negroponte was developing, and someone had gotten wind of that and that was going to become the Google PC. What I realized when people asked questions like that was I could never in good faith answer any question along the lines of 'Was Google developing a blank?' with a definitive 'No' because the nature of Google's culture, and the nature of 20% time, means that for all I know, for almost any product that someone could imagine, there might be someone at Google who's working on something related to it, who genuinely hopes that he or she will develop a product exactly like that. Now, whether Google would ever launch that kind of product, maybe the odds are pretty small. But it made me realize that we can't speak as definitely as our audiences sometimes wish we could."

Indeed, Google and its employees move in mysterious ways.

Google has lost another employee to Facebook: Eliot Schrage, the company's VP of global communications and public affairs.

Schrage will become Facebook's new VP of communications and public policy. He joins several other former Googlers at Facebook, including Sheryl Sandberg, who left her job as Google's VP of global online sales and operations in March to become Facebook's new COO.

Schrage spoke with InformationWeek last September for a story about Google's public relations strategy that never really came together.

The original thesis of the piece, that Google's unique approach to public relations had helped it in its meteoric rise, proved to be difficult to support.

After interviewing several public relations professionals, the consensus seemed to be that while Google handled public relations admirably, the company's impact on communications and public relations had more to do with how search engines influence the accessibility of information than with how Google's specific public relations practices influenced other communications professionals.

"Search engines have changed public image and corporate reputation dramatically," said Steve Rubel, senior VP in Edelman's Me2Revolution Group who runs the popular Micro Persuasion blog. "And I think what PR professionals do day to day in their jobs has not caught up with that yet. Search engines probably have a bigger impact on brand and corporate reputation than any other force in the world. The minute anybody anywhere gets interested in something, unless it's really an impulse purchase or it's something they're going to buy without much research, they're going to go on Google -- or any search engine for that matter -- and research it.

"Based on that they're going to make a decision," Rubel continued. "And that has a bigger impact on brand reputation than anything out there. With all due respect to you guys, an article in the press impacts reputation in a tremendous way, but that's one moment in time, and there can be another story the next day or a week later or what not. And Google remembers everything."

"I don't think the 'whole world' looks at Google" for guidance on PR, said Renee Blodgett, president of Blodgett Communications, in an e-mail. "Sure, it's a giant and people pay attention, but it doesn't make sense to model your whole PR program around what Google does, as much as it didn't make sense to model your whole PR program around what Microsoft did 10 years ago."

Nonetheless, Schrage when interviewed made some interesting points about how Google's corporate culture influenced its communications policy and practices.

"We made a strategic decision shortly after I arrived that our modus operandi, the driving force behind our communication efforts, would be the principle of transparency," said Schrage. "We found that the benefits of being more clear about what we were doing, or at least the principles underlying what we were doing, outweighed the potential competitive disadvantages of being more clear and more direct.

"Of course, at the margins we don't tell everybody always what we're doing, because there are competitive concerns and confidentiality concerns," Schrage said. "But I think anyone looking at the company today would say that we're much more open about our plans and directions than we were two years ago. And certainly more than we were three or four years ago, before the IPO. And that was a conscious decision for a number of reasons. We'd reached a size and a scale where false rumors really damaged our relationships with key audiences, with users, with advertisers, with other business partners. So rather than letting false rumors circulate or grow, it made sense for us to make our case for what we were doing and why.

"And you sort of saw that recently with the whole spectrum auction," said Schrage. "In the past we might have been much more secretive about what we were doing and why, and in this case we really made the decision -- close to the end of the process to be sure -- that it really was in our interest both commercially and for our users to be very clear about the principles that we thought should underlie the availability of the 700-MHz spectrum."

See original article on InformationWeek.com