Recent movie trailers have previewed the upcoming film The Social Network, directed by David Fincher and produced by Sony. "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies," the movie's tagline declares, but the movie's already made a few enemies itself. In fact, Sony discovered it can't market its movie about Facebook's founding on the Facebook site itself.
[youtube]Cz3MkQH7ch8[/youtube]The movie is based on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Money, Genius, and Betrayal, and showcases the relationship between Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, who created the popular social network while at Harvard. Zuckerberg, who declined to be interviewed by Mezrich for the book, has said that he would prefer the movie had not been made in his lifetime. The refusal on Facebook's part is based on their policy that the company will not allow ads that reference Facebook unless the company has agreed to the reference.
Instead, Sony's turned to Twitter to spread the buzz, paying to promote the trending topic #socialnetwork. Trending topics, a list of the hottest topics on Twitter, are included in the Twitter sidebar, allowing users to see what's the hot news of the day. In this, the company's following the example of other comapnies that have paid to have trends promoted, such as Red Bull, Bravo, and Virgin America.
