Sometimes in PR, no matter what you do, something else just comes out of the blue and sweeps away your opportunity.
That’s what it might feel like for Facebook today. Yesterday the social giant launched a tie up with Skype where it will offer 1:1 video right on the network through its existing chat functionality.
It’s a good innovation and one that I’m sure will be used a lot.
But the problem for Facebook is that Google had, as part of its Google+ announcement, launched a feature called Hangouts, where groups of up to ten could have online video chats together. The Google tool was better, slicker and announced earlier.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, Facebook shouldn’t be too worried as, at the moment, it’s 600m active users will care much more about this announcement than about Hangouts.
But, I still think Facebook’s embattled PR team failed to approach this announcement in the best way.
An ‘awesome’ mistake
As soon as Google+ launched last week the comparisons with Facebook have been fast and furious. And rightly so. The fact that Facebook’s first post-Google+ announcement saw the network fail in a very obvious way to match Google+ is unfortunate.
Not least because of the way Facebook touted the press conference yesterday. Speaking in Seattle last week, Zuckerberg called it ‘awesome’ which clearly raised expectations to meteoric levels. The announcement certainly wasn’t awesome which has left the media reaction today less than positive.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on Facebook. Clearly, as stated above, this is good news for their users. And the link up with Skype (read: Microsoft) is certainly interesting.
My beef is in the way this was handled. Simple PR rules were broken: don’t overhype, manage your timing and make sure you match up to your competitors.
There’s nothing Facebook can do to influence how and when Google does things, but a good PR department would have the strength and courage of its convictions to speak out when an announcement looks doomed to #fail.