• by Shankar Gupta , August 15, 2005

As Thefacebook, a social networking service for college students, prepares to expand to 1,400 U.S. four-year colleges next month, the company is also preparing to broaden a program that allows advertisers to create sponsored groups for discussions centered around products.

The initiative started quietly several months ago with MasterCard as the first sponsor. Since then, other sponsors have included Apple, Victoria's Secret, and Electronic Arts, which uses the groups to promote two current sports titles and is considering adding two upcoming ones--NBA Live 2006 and March Madness 2006.

The groups are described as "paid promotions by an outside company" on Thefacebook's Web site. "The sponsor controls the look and feel of the group, but does not have access to its members' personal information or profiles," states a definition on the site.

John Verner, a senior media planner with Freestyle Interactive, Electronic Arts' agency for the campaign, said Electronic Arts sponsors groups in an effort to reach college-age males. "Obviously, college students are an important target for EA as a game maker," said Verner. "Facebook is really the most targeted reach to the college guy that we can buy out there."

Groups on Thefacebook allow students to create and gather around common interests, often around popular college activities like video games ("NYU Loves Halo 2"), popular TV shows ("Family Guy Fanatics"), and drinking ("Jagermeister Is the Milk of Satan and I Love it!"). The groups allow students to become members, and post on a message board that can be read by other group members or browsers.

Verner said the boards for EA's sports titles have become quite popular, drawing hundreds of students from individual schools, and tens of thousands overall. "It gives them a forum to just trash talk, and sound off about what they like or hate about the game," he said. "It takes on its own life without us having put a lot of time into managing it." In addition to the sponsored groups, EA also purchased a set of display ads on the site, which click through to the group itself.

Matt Cohler, Thefacebook's vice president of corporate development, said that part of the appeal of Thefacebook is the high frequency at which college students visit. "We've got 65 percent of the total registered user base coming back to the site every day during the school year," he said. "Because people come to the site that often... we're doing billions of page views per month." Cohler predicted that after Facebook goes live on the new campuses, page views would top 7 billion per month.