Social media is bombarding people's lives today, whether it is Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Groupon and many more 'others. Social media has changed the way people interact with each other and express themselves on the Internet. Facebook, for example, has really changed people's perceptions of themselves. We hypothesize that this altered perception in turn influences their behavior in terms of product choice and engagement with particular groups. Background of Facebook Currently, Facebook is the most trafficked social media site with over 600 million users in the United States and around the world. It overtook MySpace in January 2009 and has 58% of its users outside the United States. It has indeed developed a lot over the years. It was initially created only for the United States, but has expanded to other countries and now targets almost everyone, not just high school and college students. On February 4, 2004, Facebook was created by 19-year-old Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg. It started as Facemash in 2003, where students were allowed to compare two students and see who was "hotter". Zuckerberg launched Facemash with Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, two of Zuckerberg's classmates, as well as with financial help from Eduardo Saverin. It went through the Harvard administration but was quickly rejected for violating student privacy. But in 2004, it was recreated as Facebook. Facebook was very well received by Harvard students when it was first released. “In August 2005, Facebook was officially called Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for $200,000” (Yadav). Even with all this success, Facebook has suffered many controversies....... middle of paper ...... statuses, joining groups, attending events, posting photos, and writing notes. These features help users feel validated by their friends and other people they connect with. They promote a sense of connectedness and belonging, while also contributing to users' general feeling of positivity about themselves, and therefore their sense of individuality. Companies take advantage of these feelings of validation and connectedness between humans to build a community around their products, which carry their own sense of validation, in the hope that some of these positive feelings would transfer to their brand. The traditional Facebook marketing model is to create a page, establish a sense of community, and then get a celebrity endorsement. Yet we've found that companies that creatively move away from this model can also succeed, as Old Spice shows..