Google had a bit of a blog blowup last weekend because an employee (Lauren Turner - Account Planner, Health) advocated that the health care industry should buy AdWords terms like “Sicko” and “Michael Moore” in order to counteract the bad press that Sicko is generating. The post was published on the Google Health Advertising Blog. The blogosphere jumped all over Google for aiding HMO corporate FUD. Google deserved the tongue-lashing, and they should have simply apologized and moved on.

Instead, Google issued the following statement as a part of a larger “official” post in response to the negative PR:

Our internal review of the piece before publication failed to recognize that readers would — properly, but incorrectly — impute the criticisms as reflecting Google’s official position. [emphasis added]

So, this statement shows that the Google Health Advertising Blog is internally reviewed by Google PR. Statements made by Lauren Turner passed through the Google PR filter successfully. As such, how are Lauren’s statements NOT to be interpreted as Google’s official position? If Lauren had gone off the handle and bypassed Google PR, then I could see how Google could claim that the public’s interpretation of Lauren’s blog post as the official Google position was “proper, but incorrect.” But, that’s not what happened. Google PR filtered Lauren’s post and gave it an “OK” rubber stamp. Interpreting Lauren’s post (which Google PR OK’ed) as Google’s official position is both “proper and correct”.

Furthermore, the “Google Health Advertising Blog” where Lauren’s post was published looks official. It has an identical Look and Feel to the official Google blog, and it the official blog links directly to the Google Health Advertising Blog in a blogroll that is labeled: “Other Google Blogs.” I don’t see how a reader could be “incorrect” in interpreting the Google Health Advertising Blog as “official” given these circumstances.

Why do I care? What does this small point matter? If a corporate blog is an unofficial representation of a company, I think it should be unfiltered. Keep the PR department out of it. For example, Matt Cutts’s (Google Search Engineer) excellent personal blog clearly takes an unofficial stance. There’s no Google PR review there, and he has a clearly defined disclaimer policy:

This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Q: Heh. Did you get a talking to?
A: No, I haven’t. Hopefully I never will.

Q: Why are you doing this now?
A: Just in case. If I say something stupid in the future, it’s better to be able to point out that the stupidity is mine, and mine alone. My stupidity! You can’t have it!

This disclaimer policy is perfect (and is an inspiration for my own). All corporate blogs should aspire to this kind of unfiltered transparency. It’s sad when a company is so uptight about its message that all statements must be carefully filtered by PR and then later discredited as “unofficial” when held up to scrutiny.