Saturday, August 28, 2010

The Social Network - Set to release on October 1 2010

The story behind the creation of "Facebook"; a 5 Billion member socializing website, is set to be released on October 1st 2010. While the media is quite excited about this and a lot many have given good reviews about the film, a lot of questions remain lingering in ones mind about the popularity of this movie.

Facebook acts as a platform for networking and keeping in touch with your family and friends virtually. Most people may not like the fact that the evolution of this website, created a struggle between the founder Mark Zuckerberg and his classmates. Is this the reason that the liking towards another horror movie due to be released superseded this movie liking? It could also be wrong marketing strategy. I had been to a multiplex recently and the promos of this movie were very cynical. It showcased the vicious plots, double crossing, legal battles to name a few as the baseline of the movie. How can advertising these, possibly market a socializing network website creation story!!! What other possible approaches to market this movie could have made it more popular? May be a few positive elements added during the promos, would have made the viewers of movie and fans of "Facebook" more accountable to watch this movie.

Yet another question is, what this the right time to make a movie on Facebook. Agreed that 5 billion users are in Facebook. But really what proportion of internet users are on Facebook, and what ratio do internet users represent when compared to world population. Hence, a person not aware of internet forget Facebook may really not be interested in this movie. Looking at the Facebook popularity penetration amongst pople, had they waited for a couple of years and then made the movie. Then there is no doubt that the fan base for this movie would have drastically increased. Also, with many governing agencies planning/ indicating a ban on a few chatting websites, many movie watchers might be more skeptical about watching a movie on how it was created. When it is in the brim of being banned!!!

So at the end of the day, do we blame the marketing strategy for the low popularity for this movie before it is being released or the bad timing for release? I need to explore further and see what happens after the movie is released to critique on it :-)

2 comments:

  1. Low popularity for this movie? Just out of curiosity, where did you get this statistic from?

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  2. Hi Hari,
    I wrote this blog from my own experience as a facebook fan and information from the below mentioned link :
    http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2010/tc20100826_187353.htm

    Hope this answers your question

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