December 2010 – Page 3 – Andrew Careaga

Facebookgate all over again?

Two years ago, Brad J. Ward uncovered a scheme on Facebook involving a company called College Prowler, which was creating unofficial college and university groups in a shady fashion. Enlisting the help of several other higher ed web/marketing folks, Brad exposed College Prowler’s shenanigans to the media and the company quickly backed off. (I summarized the series of events in a post dubbed Facebookgate.)

A year later, Brad was blogging about a similar situation, this time with a company called URoomSurf. This company created a lot of “Class of 2014” groups on Facebook last year, targeting unsuspecting incoming college freshmen by offering to help them find roommates for a fee. The problem was the way the company portrayed itself — as being, in essence, an extension of colleges and universities. This year, that same company — renamed RoomSurf — appears to be doing the same thing with “Class of 2015” groups on Facebook.

The New York Times’ higher ed writer Jacques Steinberg picked up the story yesterday. (You may know Steinberg as the curator of NYT’s college admissions blog The Choice, which I talked about here last spring). Steinberg does a good job layout out the issue. I suggest you read it and pass it along to your campus admissions staff and Facebook administrators.

Thanks to the work of Lougan Bishop, Tim Nekritz and J.D. Ross, several of us in higher ed have agreed to get the word out about these shady marketing practices. Whether our efforts will put an end to deceptive marketing practices on Facebook is uncertain. But at least we can sound the warning for others.

Facebook and flackery

Last night, I watched 60 Minutes — more to hear what Ben Bernake had to say about the economy than about what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about Facebook. But since Bernake didn’t have much new to say about the economy, I’ll talk about the big (overhyped) 60 Minutes story on Zuckerberg and Zuck’s big announcement of the Facebook profile redesign. Or rather, I’ll share what a few other bloggers had to say about the segment from a PR perspective.

1. In How Mark Zuckerberg Fooled ’60 Minutes’, Paidcontent.org deconstructs the non-event, pointing out how the venerable news magazine “overplayed a purely cosmetic change” — or rather, how Facebook’s PR team played 60 Minutes to “placat[e] the older demographics most likely to have the kind of reflexive resistance that always accompanies any alterations to Facebook visual design.”

2. Another PR analysis — this one from Forbes’ Mike Isaac — hails Zuck’s 60 Minutes interview as the best piece of Facebook PR yet. The post captures how Zuckerberg came off as polished and positive.

3. In A tense look at Facebook on ’60 Minutes’, Cnet’s Caroline McCarthy moves the spotlight away from Zuckerberg to shine it on CBS. Her story summarizes how 60 Minutes approached the story as “an optimistic, yet sinister portrayal of the future of Facebook and its rising power around the world.” Yet she, too, makes note of the way Zuckerberg expertly handled the situation. “But it was Zuckerberg who maintained a dose of levity, showing a remarkable change since his days as a famously press-shy young CEO.”

In the final analysis, Zuckerberg and Facebook managed to look good. Which is not always an easy thing to do with 60 Minutes.