We recently read this article and found it very interesting. It is about two competitors of the Advertising and Media industry, Zuckerberg and Graham, and how they mentor and influence each others business in profound ways. Read below and tell us what you think!

Donald Graham spends long stretches on Facebook, sharing with 4,888 friends his interest in tattoo removal, a love of the Washington Redskins and his favorite Muppets song, "Mahna Mahna."

The 66-year-old chief executive of Washington Post Co. also shares a lot more with one of those friends: Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The two men—separated by 39 years—have formed an unlikely relationship bridging two vastly different media worlds. Introduced through a college friend of Mr. Zuckerberg in 2005, each now serves as a mentor to the other. Mr. Zuckerberg's views on social media and news-sharing have begun to have broad influence inside the Post Co., which has a $2.9 billion market value.

Mr. Zuckerberg has in turn gone to Mr. Graham for insight, even spending several days shadowing the media mogul to learn about life as a CEO. Since 2009, Mr. Graham has served on Facebook's board. Many say the company is worth up to $100 billion.

"Don will have ideas and questions that he'll want to bounce off Mark and similarly Mark takes counsel from Don," said a person close to the Graham family. "They have a very close relationship that focuses on business issues and dilemmas."

There are certainly plenty of dilemmas these days for Post Co.

The company's primary money-maker, its Kaplan education business, has been upended by new federal regulations aimed at reining in for-profit colleges Advertising and print circulation at the flagship newspaper have eroded. in 2010, the company sold Newsweek magazine for $1.

For much of the past four decades, Mr. Graham leaned on his friend Warren Buffett for advice. But Mr. Zuckerberg's Web savvy makes him a valuable guide going forward in the digital world, even if Mr. Graham is old enough to be the 27-year-old's father.

"Warren is unique," Mr. Graham said, noting the Berkshire Hathaway chairman had made an "incalculable difference" over the years providing direction. "Mark is an adviser in different ways."

Mr. Zuckerberg has helped Mr. Graham think through a number of online initiatives in which the Post Co. has attempted to harness the power of Facebook and other social-media sites.

In the summer of 2010, for instance, the company began working on Trove, which allows users to build a news site around their interests, using information from their Facebook profiles as a starting point.

When Mr. Graham told Mr. Zuckerberg about the impending launch of Trove, the two discussed other ways Post Co. could use the same technology.

Those talks in part led to the development of Social Reader, an application that lets users' Facebook friends see what articles they're reading. Since its launch in September, more than seven million people have downloaded the app.

What this dabbling in new technology means for the company in the months and years ahead isn't clear—even to Mr. Graham.

"We don't know," he told investors at a media conference sponsored by UBS AG in early December.

"Perhaps I am overly influenced by spending too much time sitting in Facebook board meetings," Mr. Graham said. "It's not the answer for revenue. It's an experiment."

The Post Co. isn't the only publisher seeking to leverage the power of the social network— both the Guardian and The Wall Street Journal recently unveiled Facebook apps offering free content. The New York Times, on the other hand, has teamed up with Google Inc. in recent years to explore new ways of presenting its news online.

Vijay Ravindran, Post Co.'s chief digital officer, said the emerging importance of Facebook and social media for news outlets mirrors what Google and search represented for media organizations a decade ago.

For the publishers who didn't embrace the power of Google and search optimization back then, "they've paid the consequences in the latter half of the decade," Mr. Ravindran said. "Facebook's a big deal and it's only going to be a bigger deal," he added. "That's the bet we're making."

Mr. Graham met Mr. Zuckerberg in 2005, introduced by the daughter of one of Mr. Graham's executives, who went to school with Mr. Zuckerberg at Harvard.

Both took unorthodox routes to their high perches: Mr. Graham became a D.C. cop before inheriting the company his family started in 1933 and Mr. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard.

At their first meeting at the Post offices, Mr. Zuckerberg explained his then-dorm room business and Mr. Graham recalled having "a very strong reaction."

He immediately tried to invest. "It was the only time in my life that I thought to make a venture investment," said Mr. Graham.

Although the investment in Facebook didn't work out in the end (another party offered Mr. Zuckerberg more money), the two bonded over the future of their businesses.

"Mr. Graham has had a strong, long-standing relationship with the company and we benefit greatly from his insights and perspective as a member of the board of directors," said Facebook spokesman Larry Yu.

In 2007, as Facebook expanded, Mr. Graham recalled getting an email from Mr. Zuckerberg: "I'm a CEO now," the young tech mogul wrote, "and would like to shadow you and see what you do."

Mr. Zuckerberg visited Mr. Graham for a few days in Washington. He went to executive meetings, attended an investor conference, walked the newsroom, and sat in the print man's book-lined office on the ninth floor of the Post building. "It was a lot of fun," Mr. Graham said.

At the end of 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg asked Mr. Graham to join the board, saying that he admired the Post Co. chairman's commitment to build the company around the purpose of "making society more open and understanding," and "not just a business."

As his friendship with Mr. Zuckerberg has evolved, Mr. Graham has expanded his tech circle beyond Facebook, where another daughter, Molly, now works. Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, for instance, recommended that Mr. Graham hire Mr. Ravindran, a former Amazon executive. In March, Mr. Graham plans to fly a group of managers to meet with executives and thinkers in Silicon Valley.

"There is much for us to learn there," said Mr. Graham.