If we're the ones social networking we might as well critique it...

“You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”

The headline for The Social Network tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg, nerdy Harvard student turned esteemed billionaire with the invention of a social networking site; Facebook. The movie, directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin depicts Mark Zuckerberg as an brilliant, yet ignorant college student who let’s Napster tycoon Sean Parker persuade him to use his advice over his orginal business partner, Eduardo Saverin.

But let’s back up a bit to the original idea of the Facebook and Divya Narendra and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss who first approach Zuckerberg with a similar idea to Facebook, but for dating. Anyone who has had an exciting idea and had it stolen, in any manner or form would side with the Winklevoss’ and Narendra in the movie. Same as how anyone who has been wronged or left out on important decisions by their best friend would side with Saverin.

 Regardless, anyone will feel a pang of guilt for these three characters, as pretentious as two of them seem. With that and the scenes where the Zuckerberg character chooses to ignore the problem instead of confront it and his dismal cooperation with the opposing lawyers, the viewer cannot help but see a different side of this poor Harvard student turned billionaire. Not necessarily in a positive light.

If I had a social networking website, controversial novel, or explicit blog, anything that I could potentially a) make a profit off and b) make a name for myself, I would welcome a multi-million dollar budget film on my story. Not only does the saying “any publicity is good publicity” come to mind, but also the fact that movies are a universal medium that reaches out to people of all ages, unlike the actual product.

(Although that can be debated as more and more people join the network.) For example, my mother does not have Facebook and doesn’t know what it is but I am sure she will go see the move, same with my father, aunt, uncle, who are all well into their forties, maybe they’ll even take my 86-year-old Granny. And after they will all talk about it. The best form of PR is word of mouth. If people aren't talking about it, then it's a not important.


The more you have people talking about it, the more you have the idea communicated. Also, I might add that Facebook has been out since 2004, and is old news. The launch of this movie has revitalized interest in the company. The point is a movie is advertising in the form of entertainment, and in today’s pop culture that is a very significant way to reach a large demographic of people.

PR Post; Zuckerberg, Hearst and Hollywood: PR Lessons Learned From the Past

I completely agree with the fact that Zuckerberg’s PR was rolling, and down the right path, I might add, but it hit a deep pothole before its destination of which affected its PR in the eyes of PR experts. After playing off the movie as blowing the drama out of proportion, Zuckerberg changed his stand point with the movie when he heard he had inspired young people to become entrepreneurs.(The fact that this one-in-a-million chance-of-success movie inspired people to be entrepreneurs makes me lose faith in humanity if at the mention of the billions people are jumping at the chance to “be just like him”.)

The author here has a legitimate argument that Zuckerberg’s decision to announce a $100 million dollar donation to Newark school system on The Oprah Winfrey Show on the opening day of the movie “seems to insult the audience’s intelligience.” But when it comes to how the public will view him for that big slip up, I don’t think it will cause a fall in his celebrity status. The only reason it was picked up was because PR people everywhere jumped at the chance to criticize the billionaire at the first chance they got. People are not going to pull ads over this one. It was a simple slip up that will be forgotten in a few weeks with the next PR blunder rears its head. We all observed and learned from his mistake. Hopefully he did too.

Related Links:

The New Yorker

The Social Network movie