The official statement of the CA “GlavSovetnik” on the false information disseminated on the Web
A new way to draw attention to a problematic topic was invented by PR specialists of one of the country’s energy companies.
On Monday, December 16, several anonymous telegram channels posted fake messages that the “GlavSovetnik” communications agency was the customer of a PR campaign against one of the country’s small energy companies. We are talking about a protracted conflict between the Finnish Fortum and the Russian “Unipro”, which is expected to come out in the public space.
The initiators of the fake campaign tried to indirectly confirm the inaccurate information with certain price lists and estimates, which they passed off as allegedly internal documents of the communication agency.
“Obviously, this is a gross forgery. Apparently, some novice designer took the logo and design elements from our site and hastily tried to make something out of this that resembles our corporate price list. Our clients themselves drew attention to the fact that the published fake does not look like the corporate documents of the «GlavSovetnik»”, said Boris Molodov, Executive Director of the communications agency “GlavSovetnik”.
Probably, the calculation of anonymous customers was quite simple: by mentioning various media outlets and a number of telegram channels in fake documents, to draw the attention of expert circles, as well as journalists and bloggers to the protracted conflict of two opponents in the energy market.
To implement this simple idea, the “Boilernaya” telegram channel was used, whose message was then posted by “Nezygar”. Most likely, the entire campaign cost customers from 650 thousand to a million rubles. Partly, these expenses justified themselves, since one of the largest telegram channels drew attention to the conflict and even named the likely customer and PR-executor of this lie dump.
“The world of PR and Telegram is very small. No sooner had they thrown a fake against us than good friends with shoulder straps immediately forwarded the correspondence of customers with those who were preparing the campaign. Meet: «Redline» … Kind and beautiful girls”, – writes the Telegram channel “Politjoystick”.
Representatives of the “Redline” agency deny their involvement in the custom campaign.
Meanwhile, the mass media, the names of which were mentioned as part of the launched fake, have already stated that they consider an attempt to involve them in a corporate scandal of energy specialists as an inappropriate and short-sighted method of working with the media, undermining the reputation of the participants in the conflict story.
“Arranging provocations with the media is a very short-sighted decision, especially if it comes from PR-agencies and organizations, whose reputation directly affects the level of success in the market. Of course, we have nothing to do with any of the parties in this story”, notes Natalya Oksak, editor-in-chief of RIA “FederalPress”. “And the information published on the Web is of a purely provocative nature, which does not correspond to reality. We are ready to defend this position in court and intend to file a lawsuit on protection of honor and dignity”.
The “GlavSovetnik” also intends to bring the situation that has arisen to the legal field. “Despite the fact that Russian legislation is imperfect in the fight against fakes and inaccurate information disseminated through anonymous channels, we have already taken the necessary measures to bring this situation into the legal field to resolve the issue of protecting the honor and dignity of the company in court”, note the lawyers of the communication agency.
