MattHaupt

It is interesting how marketers are trying to get into the Social Media game. We have all seem some really bad campaigns come through Facebook and MySpace, with some ”good” campaigns being few and far in between.

Via Twitter last night I came across something very interesting regarding a social media marketing attempt on Facebook gone terribly wrong.

All of this information you can find on SquaredPeg.com written by Brad J. Ward. Make sure if you have any questions or comments to contact him. Apparently you’ll see this story in the popular news media sometime next week.

Basically what was uncovered was that a company named College Prowler started creating or obtaining admin rights to groups on Facebook that were for incoming freshman to colleges across the country. From my understanding, most of these groups seemed to be “official” groups for incoming freshman, however were created by a person not affiliate with the school and not a incoming freshman.

The company has, since this amazing discovery, left these groups (read the company’s comment here).

Now, I am for interesting ways to gain exposure of your company and product through the use of Social Networking sites such as Facebook; don’t get me wrong. But this company broke one of the cardinal rules when it comes to social marketing: transparency.

Even if these individuals were not trying to pose like incoming freshman or an affiliate of a university, by not disclosing who they were from the beginning they have undermined the social media platform and the individuals who participate in that platform.

I know everyone keeps saying the same thing, but apparently it’s not clear. If you are a company looking to reach people using social media, you need to be honest from the start on who you are and you have to provide something of value that people KNOWINGLY seek out for themselves. You can’t use any form of trickery…or it will result in something similar to this.

I applaud Brad and the other 15(ish) people who helped him look through Facebook to find these “fraud” groups.

This is what I love about social media…if there is something fishy going on, the group members will find out (usually pretty quickly) and will spread the news about any and all forms of dishonesty from a company.

I know that College Prowler is now in the process of leaving these groups they have created, however, I hope they keep these groups around and hand them over to the proper university affiliate, so these incoming students can still have a place to legitimately talke to other students going to their school.

What do you think? Is this as big of a deal as I think it is, or is this the only way to reach people through social media?