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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)

Sony crowd-sources name for new online community

Sony this week launched a beta version of it’s new online community this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The site combines company blogs with videos, photos and polls as well as allowing users to create profiles; it’s a site for users to engage with Sony as a brand and as a company. They’re using the site at the Show both to report on product launches but also to allow people to engage with their bloggers and content. From the perspective of launching an online community, many of the usual criteria appear to be met. The community is missing just one thing: a name.

Sony are looking to co-create the name for their online community, working with those people who are first to use and try the site both to get feedback on the content and the interactions, but also to suggest a name for the community. As their chief blogger and senior vice president of corporate communications, Rick Clancy, says:

We want to get feedback from users and also we thought it would be great to reach out to users for suggestions on a name for the site. My favorite so far is ‘Sony No Baloney,’ which I used for the very first blog post, but some of my colleagues disagree. Hopefully, the community members themselves can suggest something more clever.

So what can we learn from this?

There are many things right about how Sony are launching their online community. Getting the strategy and launch right can really help to maximise the chances of success, including:

• seeding the community with content and members even before the beta launch
• bringing together the ways the company interacts – making the user experience simple and not making them do work to find out where to interact
• launching  alongside an event – capitalising upon the PR the event will bring and also establishing the clear relationship between the online and offline community of consumers – they are the same people after all, just engaging in different ways
• using the first members to help you finalise and develop the community

By working with these first members to co-create the name for the online community itself, Sony is allowing them to have real input into a significant part of the community member experience – what the community is actually called. There are many ways to engage community members and confer a feeling of ownership of the community too them, but I particularly like the idea of getting them to name the site. Naming conventions in society are important – those who help to name something feel ownership of and responsibility for it. By getting these first community members to work together to name the site they will create a set of people who feel responsibility for the success of the site and who want to work to make it a success.

Understanding the social dynamics at play in online communities is important, and if you capitalise upon them you can really help maximise the potential for success at launch and whilst you grow and develop your site.

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Some more reading

• Sony’s 2009 CES Press Conference In HD
• Live from Sony’s (first) CES 2009 press event
• Sony bolsters Web presence with social networking site
• Sony Electronics Launches Community Site
• Sony’s Social Networking Site Needs a Name
• Consumer Electronics Show: Myspace social networking site to be available through TV sets

Sony launches online community for PlayStation gamers

After many years in development, this week Sony launched PlayStation Home, an online community for Playstation gamers.

The community is something of a virtual clubhouse for PlayStation owners. All registered PlayStation Network users will be able to create their own avatar and then interact with others in a 3D environment. Some are calling this a cross between Facebook and Second Life, but this is really an online community of gamers. Members will be able to chat with and text each other, build their own ‘home’ and explore those of other members, and take part in mini games and special events.

Building on the popular chat functions that sit alongside many online games, the concept of a central community that allows members to meet and join games has been in development for a number of years. The beta launch of PlayStation Home this week shows us what Sony has to rival Microsoft and to enhance the gaming experience. As Kazuo Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, says:

PlayStation Home is truly a promising network community service. We are committed to providing PS3 users with exciting gaming experiences with PlayStation Home and together with our partners and users, expand the new world of interactive entertainment as we move forward.

So what can we learn from this?

To some extent Sony is providing its gamers with something they have wanted for some time – a way to meet and exchange with other gamers, to easily identify and join multi-player games and to extend and enhance their experience of using the PlayStation.

There has been much discussion over the last couple of days about the actual functionality and use of PlayStation Home. Microsoft called the technology as “outdated” and some features are not yet live – streaming video and music will be in a later release. But overall response from gamers themselves has been quite positive.

Undoubtedly Sony hope that Home will be a success, and for me success would be if they retain gamers for longer periods of time because of this. They can monetise Home quite easily, either by selling functionality or features within the environment itself (such as selling houses or other property to users or taking a cut of peer-to-peer sales). Or they can monetise through charging for downloads, streaming music and video and entry to special events and games. And let’s not forget the benefit they might be able to get from advertising if they so desired.

This kind of online community may seem like a clear candidate for success, and it is certainly true that the members share a common interest and goal (something that is critical to success of any community). But perhaps the real marker of success will be if the community fills a real need that the members have. Home needs to focus on gaming and on making gaming, easier, more fun and perhaps more challenging. They’re not building a new Second Life (or Facebook, Bebo or anything) as some people have suggested. Rather they’ve identified a need that their gamers have and are using social media and online communities to help meet this need. Always a good strategy.

Read all our Social Media Diary entries

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Some more reading

• Sony Answers Some Key PlayStation Home Questions, Dodges Others
• PlayStation Home Launches Everywhere December 11th [Ps Home]
• Home Launches On December 11 [Home]
• PlayStation home opens its doors
• PlayStation Home beta adding more users this Fall — in other words, delayed
• There’s no place quite like Home
• PS3 Virtual World Finally Finally ‘Here’
• Sony unveils PlayStation community site
• Here’s What You Can Buy In ‘Home’ So Far, For A Total Of 26 Dollars
• Microsoft says PlayStation Home ‘feels like 2005 tech’
• 10 Things You Need to Know About PlayStation Home [Ps Home]

I’m at the Retail Business Show today, meeting people and attending talks and presentations on social media and online branding. I love events like this – they are great sources of inspiration and new ideas and also help to reinforce things you think yourself. Today has helped with the latter – Matthew Yeomans from Custom Communication said something that we truly believe at FreshNetworks: that customers have really good ideas.

His talk on social media and brand reputation online showed ways that brands can interact online and also some successful (and less successful) uses of social media and other new ways of doing things. Two great examples that show good and bad use of the online space by brands come from different sectors and different countries: Nokia and Sony. Both thought it would be great to increase their presence online and thought that it would be powerful if they could leverage their brand advocates to help with this. In fact they both had a very similar idea – get their brand advocates to use blogs and diaries to show positive interactions with their product. The problem is one did it well and another less so.

Nokia’s idea was to find the most active Nokia bloggers online, give them the newest Nokia phone and send them on a round-the-world trip on condition that they blog daily and send back photos and videos sent with the phone. The site (Urbanista Diaries) has the blogs and photos and is using these in marketing – running ‘where was this photo taken’ competitions as a second wave word of mouth campaign. It works – Nokia is upfront about what they’re doing. They use real customers to blog and produce content and have an engagement strategy that continues the campaign.

Sony was less successful. The launch of the PSP was accompanied by a blog that purported to be from users of the product. It wasn’t; the blog was actually being run by journalists who were blogging as if they were the PSP’s target consumer group. This was discovered and spread rapidly online. To their credit Sony took down the site and after just a day and all they were doing was running what could have been a powerful word of mouth marketing campaign. Perhaps they were nervous of letting their actual customers do the blogging and so they wanted to control what was said, and how their brand was portrayed online.

These examples show both that customers have good ideas but that firms can sometimes be nervous about harnessing customers online. The Nokia blog enabled Nokia and other consumers to see how an expert interacted with their product, the kind of photos and videos they could take and other advantages of the product that may not have been discovered without this. The Sony experience shows that firms can be reluctant to actively harness their own consumers online; perhaps nervous about what they might say (remember: customer opinions can be bad as well as good) and about launching something they had little or no control over.

There is a need to provide a means by which customers can share their ideas but also in a way that’s harnessed by the brand. Some are happy to let their customer ideas feed directly into marketing campaigns and activities online (as in the Nokia example) whereas others might want to keep the ideas private, in a way that the brands can control and harness but without the risk that their image may be tarnished externally. This is where private social networks are powerful – the ability to create an innovations lab that is invitation only and that firms can use to test their ideas, getting and responding to feedback (good or bad!). These can be strong communities – you recruit your most active online commentators from a broad or specific consumer segment and tell them that what they are saying and commenting on is feeding directly into your brand’s innovation process. The results are incredible!

We’re actually talking about private social networks later this afternoon at the Retail Business Show and I’ll be posting the slides here another time.