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)

What’s the best way to promote films with online communities?

I was pondering this last night when my friend Jim sent me the trailer for his directorial debut, Eden Lake. As the UK Marketing Director of a major film company recently told me, film promotion has some particular challenges. Speed, for one: the marketing has to be so effective that penetration in the target demographic goes from 0 to 80% in about a fortnight. Flexibility is another: with the right word of mouth, a film that starts playing in only a few cinemas can build up sufficient momentum to get country-wide distribution in a matter of days.

But while film production companies might specialise in particular genres, the film distribution arms (on which they depend hugely for successful sales and marketing) usually don’t – one week it’s art-house, the next grisly horror. Since the target audience is changing all the time, it’s no wonder that their marketing is usually highly tactical, very campaign-based, and quite traditional – mainly above-the-line promotion on TV, billboards and in cinemas. Sometimes viral campaigns are thrown in, but these tend to be short-lived, fairly hit-and-miss affairs.

So how should online communities be used to promote films? By their very nature, communities take some time to grow the social bonds that make them sustainable. So aside from the multi-film franchises, few individual films have enough time in their marketing slot to generate community on their own micro-sites.

But there is an alternative: to treat the microsite as a hub, which connects the official site to the multiple other spaces where community and conversations can form. The site of upcoming Bond release Quantum of Solace has done this successfully by mixing exclusive content with links to fan sites on social networks (like MySpace and Facebook). It also has a download section to promote cross-linking with widgets that allow consumers to add features to their own social networking or blog sites. In fact, it’s exactly the same approach that we recommend to our clients when they’re building a customer community – they should see it as a space they manage that can also integrate with the other external sites they participate in.

The other advantage of this approach is that it can help distinguish the official from the user-generated content, some of which might be well-produced enough to lead to genuine confusion. Admittedly the amusing re-edit of The Shining trailer as a romantic comedy is unlikely to mislead anyone. But well-made spoof or malicious content can have adverse effects on a brand if people think it’s genuine – ask the banks, who suffer from the many phishing emails that no doubt turn up in your spam box every day. Equally if, like my friend Jim, your film is about a gang of louts targeting a young couple, you don’t want really user-generated re-enactments as part of your marketing campaign…

So when it comes to short-lived, campaign-based marketing, a central hub that links to other sites might be more appropriate than a dedicated community site. Real community takes time to form and should be sustainable – it’s a long-term relationship, not just a one night stand.

Some more reading

• Social Network Retention– How to Achieve Engagement Nirvana