WIR - 500,000,000 Friends

The box office results are in for the first weekend run of The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin, which took the number one spot away from the Wall Street sequel this past weekend.  I can think of no better metaphor for the passing of the baton from one generation to another than Mark Zuckerberg taking the crown away from Gordon Gekko.

As part of a larger examination of Facebook we’ve been undertaking, we attempted to see whether anything can stop the juggernaut that is Facebook and, frankly, we’ve found that neither self-inflicted nor Sorkin-inflicted wounds can stop Facebook.  In a recent read of high school and college students, 97% were on a social network, almost 100% of which were on Facebook.  Facebook is used by 96% of teens and collegians, of which there are more than 45 million in America today.

While browsing and chatting are the mainstays of social networking, status updates, games and private messages are important daily activities for those on Facebook.  Examining the service interruption that occurred on September 22nd and 23rd, we found that while more than a third of those on Facebook recall experiencing the recent outage, the impact was minimal:

Question: What impact does it have on you when you experience disruptions or outages on the social networks that you use?

• No big ... I’ve got better things to worry about (37%)
• I move on, saving what I need to do for later (26%)
• I check the site infrequently to see when I can get back on (25%)
• I check the site continuously to see when I can get back on (10%)
• Really big deal ... I can’t live without it (1%)

SO, not even two days of funky service can put a dent in the most popular social network in the world and, according to ComScore, the second most popular video website in the US.

How about the ‘unsympathetic’ treatment of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network?  Similarly, it’s no big deal according to the more than 500 teens and collegians we surveyed over the weekend.  While less than 5% of those surveyed had seen the movie over the weekend (indeed, box office stats by boxofficemojo.com state that more than 55% of weekend viewers were over the age of 25), half of teens and collegians plan to see the movie soon.

We asked what kind of impact a positive portrayal of the founders of Facebook in The Social Network would have on their opinions of Facebook and an overwhelming 63% said that it would have no impact whatsoever.  Slightly more than one third (34%) said that a positive portrayal would have a positive impact and a scant 3% said that a positive portrayal would have a negative impact.

Flipping the same question around, we asked what kind of impact a negative portrayal of the founders of Facebook in The Social Network would have on their opinions of Facebook and three-quarters (75%) said that it would have no impact whatsoever.  Slightly less than one in five (18%) said that a negative portrayal would have a negative impact and 7% said that a negative portrayal would have a positive impact.

In the end, neither service disruptions nor a tell-all expose of the unbridled ambition that brought Facebook to life can keep 500,000,000 friends apart.