Matthew Melnyk

Almost a year ago now I came across a collection of disingenuous face book groups which were run by a social media marketing company. These groups claimed to be ‘official’ groups of Ontario University classes.  Similar ones have returned geared towards next years entering class.

To provide some background: the entering class of a university join a group as a way to be part of a community of people who they will be sharing experiences with over their time at school.

Its nice to have a community to can go to when you have questions about exams, or books, or moving into a new place.  Because this is such an obvious development on facebook, it also is very attractive to marketers.  If you create the ‘class of….’ groups for some universities, and once they are populated, you potentially have the ability to message thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of students, depending on the scale of your organization.

After the discovery of the fake groups earlier this year, these ‘class of 2013′ groups were shut down (for the most part), and while it was inevitable that these kinds of marketers would come back, at least for one year they had been removed from the equation.

Flash forward to today.  The grade 12 population of Ontario is rapidly begining to apply for University.  They are being given access codes to the application system, and have until January 13th to do their online application for Ontario Universities. Coinciding with this, is the development of facebook groups by marketers who intend to capitalize on the excitment these students feel as they apply, and begin to receive acceptances.

To be fair, I’m making an assumption about the groups below. I am assuming they are run by marketers, however; when over a dozen Ontario post secondary groups are run by the same handful of people, its probably a safe bet.

Another important distiction between these groups and the ones that I dealt with in the spring is that these do not claim to be official.  They are simply made to look and feel that way.  That is important to note, because the people running these groups are not blatentely misleading students as was being done before.

As for what to do about these groups, I’m somewhat torn.  For institutions like my own, where we have a dedication to having a large presence in social media, I think groups like this can be confusing for students.  They don’t know where the right information is, or what groups they should be joining to get it.

I can’t speak for other institutions, and whether or not they believe that these kinds of groups pose any significant risks for their students. Personally, I think they do.  The people organizing these groups do not have the students’ interests at heart, and that is fundamentally problematic.

I have gathered this list to help my peers at other institutions to decide whether they should act to shut down these groups or not.

Laurier : http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=183483793456

Ryerson: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=168713973006

Waterloo: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=190092413979

Durham College:  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=172495116108

York: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=171956292023

Guelph: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=167281194372

McMaster: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=201222937924

University of Toronto: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=165605994308

George Brown: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=168640469356

University of Toronto: Scarborough: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=172315987566

UOIT: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=324597180614

Brock  http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=175512327174