Controversy Still Brewing: Is Facebook Fake?
You know the saying, “One bad apple can spoil the bunch”? Well, it’s true. Recently, I read an article that talked about how marketers are ruining the Facebook experience by creating fake groups in order to “conduct research”. This article was one of a few that have popped up in the past few days in response to Andrew Careaga’s post about the Facebook debacle.
According to Careaga’s post, Brad Ward uncovered some disturbing information about Facebook with regards to fake groups and pages that were being set up in order to lure unsuspecting students- much like a stranger tries to tempt a child with candy. Ward realized that something was amiss after examining hundreds of “Class of 2013″ groups that popped up and realizing that they were all created by the same person/company. Careaga writes:
According to Brad’s investigation, a cadre of Facebookers are either setting up unofficial “Class of 2013? pages that purport to represent various colleges and universities, or they’re joining already-established pages and becoming co-administrators. (These types of pages are usually created by students who have been accepted into a college and want to start networking with their fellow classmates-to-be. Some colleges and universities encourage the development of these pages, while others just let it happen.) Brad discovered that certain names appeared over and over again in the category of page administrator for many of these pages. In his post, Brad suggests that someone — or some organization, or group — has set up a ring to create Facebook pages in order to connect with “easily 1,000,000+ freshman college students.”
Updates
Brad’s original post, entitled There’s Something Going Down on Facebook. Pay Attention, created such a buzz that after a relatively short period of time, people were leaving a ton of comments on the blog post wanting to get to the bottom of the matter. After all, why would someone want to purposely dissuade Facebook users? Who was behind this? Brad had traced several of the names he found in the fake Facebook groups to a site called College Prowler, a company based out of Pennsylvania that publishes student-written guidebooks about colleges.
Figures.
Before long, the chief executive officer of College Prowler, Luke Skurman, confirmed that his company was directly or indirectly involved in the creation of the “2013″ Facebook groups when he left the following blog comment on Ward’s blog:
Yes, College Prowler has been directly or indirectly involved with the creation of multiple Class of 2013 groups. The original purpose was to use these groups as a way to inform students that they can access a free guide about their new college on our site. No employee or anyone else associated with College Prowler has used these groups to send out messages or wall posts.
Until about an hour ago, I was unaware that College Prowler was working with another company that may have been using fake aliases to create to these groups. The groups that College Prowler was responsible for creating were set up with real accounts. Here are the names that are associated with College Prowler, and they will all be removed immediately from the Class of 2013 groups(all other names are not controlled by College Prowler):
• Mark Tressler
• Ron Tressler
• Brenna Young
• Lisa Young
• Lauren Plavchek
• Jessica LashFrom a big picture perspective, having a marketing strategy using social networking sites (like Facebook) is something that is necessary to be effective in our business. We do pride ourselves on being forward thinking and aggressive. In this instance, in its current form, we have crossed the line and to reiterate, we will be removing our administrator privileges from all of these 2013 groups immediately.
Feel free to email, luke@collegeprowler.com, with any additional concerns or questions.
Luke
You can read more about it the following blog post published on The Chronicle of Higher Education website. While the issue seems to have temporarily resolved itself (with this particular matter), it makes you wonder how many more groups like this one there are on popular sites like Facebook. Additionally, while the dust may seem to be settling, I can’t help but think that increasing numbers of people are feeling more unsettled with how they view and/or value marketing when things like this happen.
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January 07 2009 02:00 am | Internet Marketing and Internet Related and Marketing and Social Media News
Experiential Marketing on 10 Jan 2009 at 7:03 pm #
In my opinion Facebook has already become far too commercialized. All the time you end up being invited to market research groups or receive invitations to add applications. Facebook does have to be careful as it’s certainly becoming more like MySpace, which I’ve always found has too much spam and too many companies promoting themselves.
Sergio on 30 Jan 2009 at 10:53 pm #
Facebook even banned some George Orwell t-shirts