Learning how to game Facebook

Interesting article on Techmeme from Brad Ward of Butler College in the US, about how a ring of people are setting up phoney "Class of 2013" Facebook groups for new 2009 students. He found c 500 colleges with these groups, all run by a small group of people. At first he was nonplussed - what is the point of cybersquatting like this, when the incoming students will do what they will anyway - then he realised what the game is:

Sure, not for one school. Not for tiny little Butler, with 900 incoming students.

But for 500+ schools? Owning the admin rights to groups equaling easily 1,000,000+ freshman college students?

That’s huge.

Think of it: Sitting back for 8-10 months, (even a few years), maybe friending everyone and posing as an incoming student. Think of the data collection. The opportunities down the road to push affiliate links. The opportunity to appear to be an ‘Admin’ of Your School Class of 2013. The chance to message alumni down the road. The list of possibilities goes on and on and on.

The company doing it apparently goes by the unbelievable name of "College Prowler"! (Though they claimed it was an un-named contractor doing a lot of these phoney groups - their comment on the original blog post is, um, "interesting".

From 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.

I.e. they were caught at it. The thing that immediately occurs is how many more of these rings are there going on, its unlikely to be limited just to college (university) students - and how would one even find out? Unlike say Twitter where you can find the Twerps, its far harder to analyse Facebook to get this data.

But to an extent maybe this is just a fractal effect of Facebook culture - starting with Facebook's dodgy Terms & Conditions, taken on through the sleazy play that was (is) Beacon, can one expect any better?

Update - Larry Dignan argues that this may be an argument for verification, but it is very hard to see how that would work - determined scamsters will fudge it anyway, and it just increases friction for the average teenage college user (do they need credit cards or what for example?)