How firms are using 'black PR' to tear down their rivals

What’s in a name? A fortune, if you can trash it.

Public relations in a digital world is increasingly as much about demolishing a brand as about building it, as shown in a recent spat between e-commerce giant Alibaba and social networking major Tencent.

The mudslinging between two of China’s most prominent internet companies has brought into focus the rising phenomenon on the mainland of what has come to be known as “black PR” – online campaigns run by public relations companies maligning their clients’ rivals.

Trouble erupted when Tencent’s PR team complained on the company’s Weibo account that Alibaba’s PR department had planted negative articles in the media to tarnish Tencent’s image.

As evidence, Tencent posted screenshots of internal Alibaba e-mails that carried the draft of anti-Tencent stories. The images on Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, show drafts of news articles about the supposed instability of the management team at WeChat – Tencent’s mobile instant messaging product – that were attributed to “an employee who has just left Tencent”.

These drafts were apparently sent to various mainland websites and carried by them.