Phony Facebook Groups
by Taylor Trussell, Stein | December 19th, 2008Brad Ward at Squared Peg has discovered what appears to be an effort by College Prowler to co-opt Facebook groups for stealth marketing campaigns. This is all still sketchy, but the evidence is pointing to interns for College Prowler joining Class of XXXX Facebook groups and gaining admin rights.
What the implications of this are isn’t clear, but if you have an unauthorized Class of XXXX group on Facebook (and, of course, you do), it’s worth checking out Ward’s list of suspicious names and paying attention to this.
UPDATE: The president of College Prowler has taken responsibility (this comment was posted to Squared Peg):
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.
