By Mike Wellman
Sometimes you see something, and you just have to share it. When I caught this movie trailer earlier today thanks to my favorite geek-friendly blog, Techland, that’s what I had to do. That’s also what this movie is all about—how the power of social networking and viral growth led to the meteoric rise of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg as a major media player. It seems to me like it may be a “must-see” for corporate communicators this fall.
Communicators, I have to be honest and say that I really just wanted you to see this and don’t have much to add in terms of commentary beyond surprise that Justin Timberlake has a film career (did you know he was in Shrek the Third?) and mild interest in how many “likes” the trailer will get on Facebook. It’ll be interesting to see if the movie will have the same sort of pull that the network itself did and if the PR team at Sony can harness those same emotional triggers to promote the film. That brings me to our diversion for today:
If you were on Sony’s PR team for The Social Network, how would you promote it?
on 30 June 2010
Respond
I’ll jump in and contribute first…
After giving this a healthy amount of thought, my idea (which started as a joke, but might actually work) would be to open the film with a Pixar-esque two-minute short on the inception of Twitter. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
on 8 July 2010
Respond
One of the perennial challenges with movies is having to build a brand in a couple months only to see it completely dissolve after the release date (which is why studios make sequels even with modest success rates (http://flowingdata.com/2010/06/28/do-movie-sequels-live-up-to-their-originals/).
Instead of re-inventing the wheel, there are some great companies leveraging the work and tapping into existing audiences. Digisynd, for example, has been great at taking amateur remixed content and realizing their potential. It’s not how many friends you have, its how big of an influencer you are.
In promoting the movie, I would go to my influencers. From leveraging JT’s strong fan-base to finding the owners of related properties facebook fanpages, go to them and have them be your evangelists.
on 23 July 2010
Respond
Vincent – Thanks for your thoughts, and I appreciated the link you posted, though I will say that it was a little depressing. All those great movies and terrible sequels! Jurassic Park… well, probably better not to get into it. I agree that your influencers are great to harness, though it’s interesting (and maybe not too surprising) that the film can’t officially promote itself on Facebook… There was an insightful article in AdAge (http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=144372) from Chris Thilk that brings up another good point to that end: those influencers don’t stop once the hype has been built and the movie comes out, and they do need to be managed afterwards because whether or not the film lives up to the hype will travel just as fast. Chris also points out that the speed of information is (hopefully) going to raise the ante on quality of content as well.