Informal Survey: "The Social Network" Polarized User Views of Zuckerberg but Not Facebook

The Social Network, the new movie about the founding of Facebook, has gained enough positive reviews that it's being cited as an Oscar contender. It's a financial success, too, having already reached the $100 million revenue projections that its creators were aiming for. So did the movie have any effect on users' perception of Facebook? Prior to the release of The Social Network, Facebook seemed to think it would, with executives battling the movie's creators to tone down the final product, while decrying its fictionalized take Facebook's founding. But the company appeared increasingly relaxed as the October 1st release date neared, and it ended up taking the entire headquarters workforce to go see it. We ran an informal user survey this past month to gauge just what the effect has been. Note that the survey only ran once -- it wasn't a before-and-after poll -- and the sample size was limited to a few dozen respondents who had already seen the movie. We asked a simple set of three questions to start: Before seeing The Social Network, how did you feel about using Facebook.com, Facebook the company, and Mark Zuckerberg? Respondents were able to answer on a scale ranging from "strongly dislike" to "strongly like". To find out whether the movie had caused any of our respondents to change their mindset, we asked the same three questions again: After seeing the Social Network, how did you feel? We won't keep you in suspense: The Social Network budged the opinion of only a tiny minority of respondents about Facebook, the company, or facebook.com, the site they use every day. One interesting snippet did show up in the answers about Mark Zuckerberg, though. As the founder and chief executive of the company, he was featured as the main character in The Social Network, with a driving personality that makes him part hero, part villain. Those with neutral feelings before viewing didn't change their perceptions afterwards. However, the film had a polarizing effect on most others. Results showed a significant bump in the number of users who previously liked or were unsure of their attitudes toward Zuckerberg moving either to "strongly like" or "dislike" the CEO after having seen the movie. The numbers dropped significantly among those who had previously liked him or didn't know, and fell slightly among those who had previously strongly disliked him. We didn't target the survey by age, but that factor could be at play. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that younger users -- especially entrepreneurial ones -- were more drawn to the movie's portrayal of Zuckerberg's vision and singular drive, even as older people recoiled at its representation of his sometimes-ruthless actions. “When you talk to people afterward, it was as if they were seeing two different films,” co-producer Scott Rudin told The New York Times. “The older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure who comes out of the film with less of himself than when he went in, while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star, who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created.” Public opinion of Zuckerberg does matter, beyond any perception of the company. The youthful CEO has become one most powerful figures in the tech world, much as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others did. Whether he's seen as a positive or negative force could affect Facebook's latitude in both the legal and public realms.

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Informal Survey: "The Social Network" Polarized User Views of Zuckerberg but Not Facebook

Chris Morrison

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Chris Morrison