FreshNetworks Blog

Research in September by 360i, a search agency in London, shows a direct correlation between the balance of negative and positive Tweets about a movie, and its performance at the box office. Looking at four movies (District 9, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Brüno) they show that films that have a greater proportion of negative posts and reviews on Twitter also enjoy a higher day-on-day fall in Box Office ticket sales after launch. And whilst we must not confuse correlation with causality, it seems for these movies that those movies who have more negative posts on Twitter also see a bigger drop in sales after they open.

The relationship between Twitter and the success of a movie is starting to become clearer. Whilst this data is not sufficient to claim that there is a direct impact of negative reviews on Twitter on ticket sales, it is evident that negative reviews in Twitter, among other things, are impacting on consumer choices. And in many cases they are choosing not to view the movie.

Traditional movie marketing and performance is tracked closely, with day-on-day ticket sales being measured and the results feeding directly into the amount and type of PR and marketing activities that take place. This is a long-standing technique that is used to bolster ticket sales if they are not performing as well as expected, and to identify over-performing movies and work to amplify the impact they are having. With social media, this approach needs to adapt and change.

The main impact of Twitter is its speed. It is easy and quick for movie-goers to post a review of the movie they have just seen, and for a blockbuster movie in an opening weekend, you might expect many thousands of reviews in a short space of time. The content is concentrated in a small amount of time and discussions about a particular movie can quickly become trending topics. For a short amount of time it is relatively easy for it to seem that “everybody is talking about” a movie when it opens. And if users are negative about it, then this can have a serious impact on the movie and on ticket sales. This is dangerous for the studios, especially those who don’t have an effective social media marketing strategy. They can very quickly lose control of their movie’s reputation and the positive word-of-mouth can get drowned by the negative.

Twitter is, in fact, a great place for studios. Whether the direct causation between negative posts and decreasing box office sales is true or not does not matter. Twitter provides an instant and detailed feedback mechanism for studios. Those with effective buzz tracking and monitoring services can quickly see the impact of a movie from the moment the audience leaves the first screening. They can then use social media, and traditional marketing and PR activities, to amplify the positive word of mouth and also to help to minimise the impact of the negative. By knowing and tracking what is going on, studios can use this information to their benefit.

Some more reading

• The Internet Takes Control of Movie Marketing (cinematical.com)
• Did Twitter bring glory to Tarantino’s new flick? (seattlepi.com)
• Is Twitter Affecting the Box Office? (mediabistro.com)
• Twitter Can Bury a Movie. It Can Also Make it a Success (mashable.com)

Guest post by Ben LaMothe

Last week, we posted part one of our interview with Shirley Brady BusinessWeek’s first community editor. In this second part, Shirley explains how she interacts with BusinessWeek’s news desk and how the BusinessWeek community management strategy is changing, including how BusinessWeek utilises crowdsourcing.

How much interaction is there between you at the Community desk and the editors on the content-producing side? Do you advise on what you believe will get the desired reaction from the BusinessWeek community?

I’m constantly interacting with my colleagues to parlay reader feedback and suggestions to editorial. Part of this job involves standing up for the reader and voicing their concerns and desires (enough of them know me by now, and on Twitter, to email or DM me to express their views. My email address is also listed on our featured readers page.

And another part is almost media literacy – involving readers in our journalism, opening up our process while inviting and respecting their opinions on a subject. You’ll see our reporters on their blogs and on Twitter, for example, posing questions and gauging the sentiment on a story as they’re reporting it. They’re not only cultivating sources and building their own communities, but getting more informed about each story, and their beats, in the process. We create hashtags, put up daily polls and ask a lot of questions – it all helps inform editorial decision-making in terms of what will resonate with our readership.

Community management is becoming increasingly important in the news industry as organizations begin crowdsourcing aspects of coverage. How is BusinessWeek’s community management strategy evolving? What’s next?

How BusinessWeek’s community strategy will evolve will depend on the new owner, assuming McGraw-Hill reaches a deal to sell the brand (bids closed on September 15th). Hopefully whoever acquires BusinessWeek will value community-building and reader engagement as much as we do now, if not more. There’s a ton to still be done and ideas to take this to the next level, which I won’t detail for competitive reasons but hinted at above.

As for other news organizations starting to embrace reader engagement: hear, hear! It’s been gratifying to see the New York Times name its first social media editor, Jennifer Preston, earlier this year; and impressive to see the variety and inventiveness of strategies employed by my peers such as Mathew Ingram at the Globe & Mail in Canada, Andrew Nystrom at the Los Angeles Times, or Andy Carvin at NPR, or to see what the Wall Street Journal is doing with Journal Community and the NYT with TimesPeople – all smart media organizations that understand the need to foster their communities in ways that breathe life into their brands, engage people with their content and enhance their mission and value proposition to the reader. Everybody’s trying something different, and while it might not always take off with readers, this inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit is clearly invigorating journalism at news organizations such as the ones I’ve named above and countless others, including beyond North America (I’m inspired by, for instance, the BBC’s Have Your Say and the Guardian’s Comment is Free initiatives).

As for crowdsourcing, as noted above, we actively solicit and value our readers’ involvement and “invite them into our newsroom,” as John Byrne puts it, to inform our news decisions and editorial process. But I also believe that excellent journalism (reporting, writing and editing) has to be at the core of what BusinessWeek and other news organizations do, even as we open our doors to our readers. We’re building community around our content, injecting readers into the mix, and shaking up any old notions (if they ever existed) that journalists have the market cornered on analysis and reporting – the Internet put paid to that idea, gladly.

As John’s fond of saying, it’s about treating each story (blog post, slide show, photo-essay, interactive graphic, podcast, video) as a spark that creates a camp fire, or in John’s words, “the journalism then becomes an intellectual camp fire around which you gather an audience to have a thoughtful conversation about the story’s topic.” I love that metaphor, as it really embodies what I love about journalism – the storytelling.

In addition to being a reporter and writer throughout my career, my first full-time job in journalism was on the TV side of this business as a producer for TVOntario 20 years ago. Even then, I jumped at the opportunity to set up forums and discussions on early BBS platforms (Genie, Prodigy, CompuServe) as I was eager to engage our viewers in what we were producing and get their feedback as we shaped our programming, lined up interviews and planned our on-air schedule. It also helped build buzz and interest in seeing the final product, and always sparked additional ideas for us to pursue.

It’s not far off from what I do now, although the technology has advanced, as the online community is just as lively and eager to get great content and contribute to what you’re doing: they’ll share ownership in your success if you’ll let them in. Give them a stake in your process and they’ll come back, especially if they’re treated as partners and not just pageviews. I think it also helps that I approach this as a journalist, which helps elevate and promote the smart conversations around what’s going on in the news, on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, around the industries and business topics that matter most to our readers.

Wave Couresy of Shutterstock

People have been going mad to grab their Google Wave invites.

The’ve been auctioned on ebay and begged for in Facebook. But my favourite story so far has been the one about Ian Tait losing his Twitter mind: Ian Tait does not have 1,000 Google Wave invites

If you still haven’t got your invite, then go here for the least imaginative way to get one.

PS did you watch the first Wave video? It was good. Long but good. Sadly I was a bit put off by the t-shirts the presenters wore. It made them look like they had sweaty chests.

If you missed the content (and the t-shirts) you can see it here:

At FreshNetworks we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in September.

1. Russian social network Vkontakte.ru plans global roll-out

Our most popular post is September revealed the global expansion plans of Russian social network VKontakte (В контакте). The social network serves 1.4 billion page views each day to its 42 million users, and attracts 14 million unique visitors each month. In one of the most engaged and fastest-growing social networking markets in the world, it is a force to be reckoned with. At the start of September, Vedomosti (Ведомости), the Russian business newspaper, reported that VKontakte had registered the domain www.vk.com and plans to begin marketing the social network in twelve new markets globally before the end of 2010. One to watch.

2. How to write your firm’s social media policy

In August we looked first at why a firm needs a social media policy, and then at how to write one.  At FreshNetworks, our approach is to keep things simple and to make them inclusive. Have a simple and clear policy on how employees should be using social media and make sure you include your employees in the process of drawing them up. And, perhaps most critically, it should encourage your employees to use social media more and not less. This post looked at five considerations we discuss with clients when developing their social media policies and guidelines that might help you if you are developing yours.

3. Thomson Holidays – how a blogger can impact your brand reputation

Andy Sharman went on holiday to Tunisia with Thompson Holidays in June this year and had, by his own account, a fairly disappointing time. Andy wrote about his experiences on his blog and within a couple of months his post had been read by over 10,000 different people and, perhaps more worryingly, was appearing above Thomson’s own sites for searches on Google for terms relating to Thomson and Tunisia. This is an example of how customers are using social media and how brands need to adapt to react. When they have complaints, a customer would traditionally enter into a private exchange with the brand. With social media, this pattern has been disrupted quite severely. Rather than a private exchange between Customer and Brand, the first few steps are public from the very beginning. From the minute the customer wants to complain their thoughts, experiences and attitudes (whether justified or not) are public knowledge. With social media, complaints have moved from being a customer service issue to being a branding and corporate reputation one. This post looks at how brands should react online to manage their reputation, when things go right and when things go wrong.

4. What to do once your firm’s social media policy is written

Building on our posts about why a firm needs a social media policy, and how to write one, this post looks at what to do once you have written your firm’s social media policy. It should be a living document, and critically one that your employees buy into an believe in. You want use of social media to become part of your employees lives. And you want your brand to benefit from this involvement, from having employees active in social media and from having conversations about them, you and your brand. So writing a policy is just the first step. This post discussed four steps to help ensure that, once you have it written, your firm’s social media strategy stays relevant and beneficial to your organisation.

5. Social media and customer service – some examples

In September, I ran a ‘masterclass’ in social media and customer service at the Call Centre Focus & Customer Strategy Conference 2009. The session looked first at the different types of social media that businesses use and the reasons for and benefits of this. The ROI that businesses can get from online customer service communities. And we then moved into some examples from customer service: some good, some bad and one just ugly. This post includes the presentation from that session and highlights examples from Zappos, Virgin Trains, Dell and United Airlines. We can all learn something from each of these.