A couple of months ago, buried deep within a post about the Memphis Grizzlies’ prosumer experiment, I made reference to how the experience of “Snakes on a Plane” using an innovative social media marketing experiment, and then failing to put butts in the seats, was being misread. In short, people seemed to jump to the conclusion that social media marketing didn’t work for movies – people might talk about it, but they don’t pay to see it. I proposed that it’s possible the movie was just bad, and you can’t blame social media for people not wanting to see it. I then tied this back to what the Grizzlies are doing, saying “remember to distinguish between whether the approach was wrong, or the underlying product was just too messed up to use it effectively.”
I now, finally, have a good example to back up the assertion. The success of the movie “Paranormal Activity” is all over the news. It is a low budget film, that’s used a slow (and staggered) release, driven by input from potential fans, to roll it out in select theatres (160 so far). Last weekend they averaged $49,379 per theatre – about four times as much as Couples Retreat (which, in fairness, was released in 3,000 theatres). You can read all about it doing a search like this, but the basic idea is that people got behind, word of mouth did it’s job, and it was a great, low-cost marketing move.
But the key lesson to me is simple. Social media allows messages to go viral – but you can’t really control the message that is sent around. So if the movie isn’t good, social media isn’t going to help you much. If it is, a lot of good things can happen. And as this trend continues, what’s really going to matter is not how you market yourself – but whether you can indeed come up with a better mousetrap.
