Matthew T Grant

In a recent interview with the Googliest leather-clad author around, Paul Coelho, Napster founder Sean Parker called The Social Network “a complete work of fiction.”

While I could write a book about that last statement, the thing that jumped out at me in the Mashable write-up just referenced was a quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg.

Apparently, when asked if he liked The Social Network, Zuckerberg responded by focusing not on its fictionalization of a reality that he has supposedly lived but rather on the size of its audience saying, “We build products that 500 million people see… If 5 million people see a movie, it doesn’t really matter that much.”

Let me just repeat that last line: “If 5 million people see a movie, it doesn’t really matter much.”

Is that true? Can it really “not matter much” if 5 million people all engage in the same activity? Of course it could be true given that 7 billion humans live on this planet. I mean, how much can the isolated actions of .07% truly matter?

If human beings are merely ciphers—numbers, eyeballs, data points—then I guess we can play a purely quantitative game and determine what really matters by simply doing the math. Billions of people have looked at McDonald’s hamburgers (most following this period of observation with the act of consumption), so they must matter more than the hundreds of millions who have looked at Facebook, right? In fact, the Facebook-seers are basically a subset of the hamburger-seers, so, if we want to understand the world and how it works, we ought to by rights spend more time focusing on the latter instead of the former.

Of course, numbers are themselves merely ciphers. They don’t have a meaning in and of themselves nor does the comparison of any two numbers have any particular meaning in itself. What meaning might be had from such comparisons depends less on the counting than on what got counted.

As far as the what behind the numbers goes, how much sense does it make to compare the number of people who have “looked at” Facebook to the number of people who have looked at a particular movie? Wouldn’t it make more sense to compare it to the number of people who have looked at movies in general? I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I would wager that many more people have seen movies than have looked at Facebook (and that all people who have seen Facebook have seen movies, while the opposite certainly does not hold). Does that mean that Facebook “doesn’t really matter that much”?

The answer to that question has to be, “No.” Facebook is more important and will have a more lasting impact on our culture than the relatively well-made feature film on its origins (which is not to say that Facebook will have a more lasting impact than movies, generally speaking). Why? Because Facebook is a medium, like film, and not a mediated object, like a movie (though, to stick with a strictly McLuhanesque taxonomy, we’d have to acknowledge that Facebook too is a mediated object insofar as it is accessed via a meta-medium like the Web).

For the same reason, I believe that the printing press has had a more lasting impact on human culture than any book printed on it, even though many more people have seen said books than have ever actually seen a printing press.

Image Source: Mathieu Thouvenin.

I’m at the Facebook sesh featuring “the Pied Piper of Social Media,” Mari Smith. If you’d like to see her presentation, you can find it here at marismith.com.

Mari started with some facts and stats about Facebook and the real eye-opener for me was that Fan Pages are the only feature within Facebook fully indexed by Google. I did not know that.

So far, the presentation has been very nuts-and-bolts about various apps that people can use to manage their social media presence, connect the various properties that they are cultivating, and, of  course, optimize Facebook. The main takeaway for this section was: be strategic and take full advantage of the technology.

Mari then asked Amy Porterfield to talk about some of the things that she has done to help her clients, such as T. Harv Eker and the Alan Shafran Group, build out their Facebook presence and, most importantly, engage fans through contests, event promotion, and emerging Facebook apps.

Mari is very knowledgeable about the Facebook universe and offered a treasure trove of highly technical suggestions about how people could effectively make the most of this medium.

However, I was somewhat unsettled by the undercurrent of themes from the life coaching, “secrets of wealth,” internet marketing scene, such as when Mari said, towards the outset, that the goal of social media strategy is to create “profitable relationships.”

Is it ok if I focus on building meaningful relationships and leave profitability to the fat cats on Wall Street?