Hello and welcome to my new blog! I believe each project has to have a strategy and be thought through before starting. I have wanted to start my own blog for awhile but was not sure which direction I wanted it to go, until recently.
This blog will go through the Technology Thoughts of a Marketing Minded person (hence, the title of the blog). I will talk about everything Technology, Social Media and Marketing and how they are working together in today’s society. I will even talk about my experience with each of them as well as my interactions and knowledge received from the Lake County Social Networking Group. This is a really awesome group of people, who love Social Media and are extremely knowledgeable about Technology and Social Media.
I am also extremely new at working with wordpress. So please bear with me as I am learning this new platform and current design. It is going to be bumpy at first, but with any project it will be nurtured and get better weekly. With that, let’s get started.
Last week Friday was opening night of the movie, The Social Network. My wife and I decided to have a date night and go and see this movie. Now we both like Facebook, and with Social Media Marketing as part of my job, we thought this was perfect. We went to the later show and the theater was only a 1/4 full, which we both thought was surprising. But after the movie, I found out that its target audience usually does not go to movies on opening weekend. It saw an opening weekend sales of $23 million.
On the surface The Social Network is about the website Facebook and how it was created, but it is much deeper than that. It is about money, power and greed. The movie starts out with Zuckerberg talking to his girlfriend in a bar near Harvard. You quickly realize that Zuckerberg is smarter than you have ever imagined, as he is a genius. He is socially inept in face to face settings and dealing with people but is on a level of his own when it comes to knowledge. The film centers on the controversy over the ownership of the idea of Facebook, which was originally called “The Facebook”.
Zuckerberg wanted something more than anyone else, it was portrayed that he believed that this was bigger than him or his roommates and this would change the world. I believe he was right in that sense. Facebook is bigger than most originally thought and has changed the game in the way that people communicate and how businesses target consumers in online marketing. They have over 500 million users and continue to grow. But the movie goes beyond that, it demonstrates what it takes to be an entrepreneur. That an idea is just an idea until it is put into action. Some Harvard students filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg claiming that Facebook was their idea. As Zuckerberg said in the movie, “If Facebook was your idea, then you should have created Facebook”. In a sense telling viewers that if you have an idea, keep it to yourself or people you trust so that no one else steals that idea and you lose out on an opportunity you may never get back. Zuckerberg was easily swayed by fame and fortune, it didn’t portray him as having money, (his lone friend, Eduardo, put up the money to start Facebook), by Sean Parker who was the Founder of Napster. Parker steered Zuckerberg in a direction of growing the business with his high up connections and nightlife parties. Eventually hurting his friendship with his friend and business partner Eduardo, who also filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg. In the end, I felt that Zuckerberg was truly sorry for some of his actions along the way of creating Facebook. If you have read the book, (which I have not), I have been told that the movie follows it very closely.
In the end, I feel that we can all take away something from this film about the youngest billionaire, whether we are aspiring to be an entrepreneur or not. Lessons that I learned are; don’t settle for the status quo, put your idea and vision to the limit, you just never know what can be reached. Communication is important in any business or project whether you are the boss or the employee, and your project is only as good as your results. Each project/idea is never finished, as there are always modifications that can be made to be done to help it grow.
I encourage everyone to see the movie whether part of your job is Social Media Marketing or you’re a casual Facebook user, and I hope you enjoy as much as I did!
