norton, brian

Pretty gripping stuff, right? Of course everyone laughed when they first heard that there was going to be a Facebook movie. Who wants to see that? But after reading the source material, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, I definitely jumped on board. The book is captivating, even if the information isn’t entirely true. It’s a story for the Internet generation. I can remember when Facebook was still thefacebook.com. I can remember when it was limited to college students and what a big deal it was when high school students and then, gasp, parents and the rest of the world were allowed into this secret club. I remember joining when none of us knew what the heck a tweet was. The story behind Facebook is indeed compelling (seriously read the book and watch the movie in October). But, assuming at least some of the portrait of Mark Zuckerberg is accurate, it paints a bigger picture of the problems Facebook has had with privacy. But I don’t want to ruin the story and, frankly, delving into the privacy issues on Facebook has been done a million times before.

Instead, I wanted to focus on the marketing of The Social Network. I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve been very impressed. From the great trailer to a wonderful tagline (You don’t make 500 million friends without making a few enemies) to a great web address (500millionfriends.com). Heck they even timed it perfectly with Facebook hitting the 500 million user mark recently. But with all that being said, I was curious to see how a movie titled The Social Network was marketing on the main social networks, especially Facebook. Here is what I have found:

• On the day that the trailer debuted Sony Pictures purchased a Promoted Trending Topic (#TheSocialNetwork). But I can’t seem to find a movie-related Twitter feed, just the main Sony feed.
• Now here is where we get interesting. There is no official Facebook fan page. Shocking that a movie that isn’t exactly friendly to Facebook doesn’t have a fan page. But, thanks to Facebook’s new community pages, there is a page for The Social Network. Only 6,000+ people have liked it so far, I am sure this will grow as the trailer makes it around the Internet.
• So how do you get your information and name on Facebook without actually creating a page? Well, you can let fans do it with a community page or you can use Facebook’s tools to get around the system. On the main movie website there is a prominent “Recommend” button. This links with your Facebook profile and tells all of your friends that you recommend that site (and thus the movie). There are 20k recommendations so far (per the site).