UPDATE 12:20PM — The post has been updated to include a response from Facebook .
What responsibility, if any, does a marketer have to disclose its involvement in a Web site that promotes its products?
Last week, CollegeProwler, a publishing company that distributes unofficial college guidebooks, sparked controversy after a Butler University employee, Brad Ward, discovered that company staffers were masquerading as high school seniors on Facebook and forming “Class of 2013″ groups for various colleges.
CollegeProwler campus guides. (Credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)After Mr. Ward, a communications coordinator at Butler, outlined his findings in a blog post titled “There’s Something Going Down on Facebook,” responses ranging from outrage to indifference poured into the comments section.
Commenter NYC Ed PhD wrote: “I don’t understand how someone could NOT see a problem with this… Sure, Ashton Kutcher doesn’t care there are fake official pages about him, but that doesn’t mean that I should tolerate a fake page that alleges to be the official page about me, nor should any college.”
Commenter Jay Collier was less upset: “Words like ‘fiasco’ and ‘outrage’ throughout this thread imply that this particularly ineffective marketing strategy, uncovered, is in the same league as, say, economics, famine, war. Please remember this is about Facebook!”
Luke Skurman, chief executive and co-founder of the company, CollegeProwler, said the sole intent of the campaign was to notify Facebook users that they could access a free guidebook on CollegeProwler’s site. Mr. Skurman said the company had not sent out any information to group members about the guidebooks, although it was planning to do so over the summer.
Using Facebook to reach his primary demographic, college students, was a logical marketing approach, he said, although failing to disclose the affiliation created problems. “If we had been clear and upfront, it could have been a more effective strategy,” he said. As it is, the residual outburst to Mr. Ward’s post may have done more harm than anything. “I’ve been in business for six and a half years and this is by far the worst P.R. we’ve ever gotten,” said Mr. Skurman. “We’re very concerned what people think.”
Facebook said that as soon as the company was alerted to presence of the CollegeProwler-sponsored groups, an investigation was initiated. “We have since found that these groups and a number of accounts associated with their creation were in violation of our terms of service. These groups and accounts have been disabled,” said Barry Schmidt, a Facebook spokesman, in an e-mail statement. “We encourage users to let us know whenever they experience content on Facebook that seems amiss.”
The issue of disclosure and authenticity has surfaced a multitude of times across the Internet, especially on popular user-driven sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
For example, YouTube videos of a group of friends appearing to pop kernels of corn with their cellphones raised some alarm about the safety of handsets among video-watchers — until it was revealed to be covert marketing for a Bluetooth headset company.
After Shaquille O’Neal realized an Internet impostor was masquerading as him on Twitter, he put his cyber-foot down and opened up a Twitter account of his own.
As the Web becomes an important component of brand identity for companies and a digital extension of identity for consumers, determining what is real and what is fake becomes even more crucial.
Most people respond by approaching the Internet with a degree of caution and several large nuggets of salt. But what else can you do? Given the ungovernable nature of the Internet, how do you figure out which sites to trust?
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