‘Nice Guy’ Mark Zuckerberg to Microsoft: Gotcha!
By DONNA BOGATIN • Mar 10th, 2008 • Category: BIG PICTUREThe blogosphere may be reeling from Business Week’s touchy-feely, public tete a tete with the 23-year old CEO of Facebook, but the seemingly shocking keynote “train-wreck” was signaled in advance, by Business Week’s two SXSW correspondents: veteran “valley girl” Sarah Lacy and newcomer Catherine Holahan.
Conventional “social” blogosphere wisdom is that all Lacy needed to do to guarantee a SXSW crowd win in advance was to “engage” the audience via her blog and/or their beloved Twitter by making sure she knew how THEY wanted her to perform her job.
Contrary to post Zuckerberg-Lacy debacle scholarly “advice” from Jeff Jarvis, however, Lacy did in-fact, “reach out” to her public, courtesy of her promoter, Yahoo co-worker, Henry Blodget, who published an ingratiating preview of Lacy’s self-focused repartee with the purported subject matter of her impending SXSW interview: Mark Zuckerberg.
Lacy on “what I’m going to ask Mark Zuckerberg”:
Mostly, I hope to draw out the real Mark. I’ve spent some 30 hours or so interviewing him, starting when he was a 19-year old punk. And you know, he’s not a bad guy.
As Lacy was prepping her own public Zuckerberg reunion, her Business Week collaborator, Catherine Holahan, publicly confirmed, via a Business Week headline, that “Mark Zuckerberg is a nice guy.” How can the recent Princeton grad be so sure? She had the good fortune of “having drinks with Zuckerberg and Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy in the Hilton Hotel lobby,” she gushes. Business Week reporter Holahan’s hard news was that the “high profile” meet and drink” took place at “the cool Hilton across from the Convention Center as opposed to the less cool Hilton a couple blocks away.”
The “cool” Business Week writers are not alone in their Mark Zuckerberg infatuation. After all, geek hero Robert Scoble was himself swept away by the Facebook wunderkid when he was courted by Zuckerberg via a tete a tete breakfast at Davos. The fickle Facebook worshipper/attacker reciprocated Zuckerberg’s personal, targeted kindness with a Scobleizer ode to the “shy” Mark Zuckerberg.
How “nice” really is the “shy” Harvard dropout? He IS facing a legal battle alleging the entire $15 billion paper Facebook fortune is based on a deceptive, illegal copycatting of the work of fellow classmates.
On the recent Zuckerberg front, the supposed Mr. “nice guy” is proud of the hard-nosed Facebook negotiating tactics employed with Microsoft because he was determined to raise “the most money with the least dilution.”
Did Microsoft get what it overpaid for? The supposedly shy Zuckerberg was emphatic in NYC in unveiling his self-described once in 100 years phenomenon Social Ads marketing product last November:
Microsoft is (only) the exclusive third-party provider of IAB standard ads. This is not going to go through Microsoft. We think this is a different kind of advertising.
Straight, hard talk, from a ”nice guy,” powerful young man determined to control how everyone in the world “connects,” thanks to his very own Facebook.
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DONNA BOGATIN is the Founder & CEO of STARTUP ALPHA
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