The Twitter Effect.
The term entered the lexicon last summer after Universal’s Sacha Baron Cohen comedy “Bruno” tumbled more than 36 percent in its first 24 hours in theaters.
One year later, the social media trend that was going to revolutionize word-of-mouth hasn't demonstrably done so. There are few movies this summer where you can point to Twitter causing a huge box office bump, or drop. Unlike 2009. Last year produced a number of huge opening-Friday-to-Saturday dips and spikes, including Warner's "The Blind Side" (up nearly 25 percent).
And studio executives that were scrambling to catch up with the phenomenon have instead decided that it’s easier to put their money where the tweets might be -- and buy “trending terms” on the service.
Meanwhile it's social media as a whole, rather than one little blue bird, that is changing the way Hollywood sells its films.
Marketing pros who fervently believe in the power of social media say Twitter was prematurely labeled a paradigm-shifter last year.
“A bad film is a bad film,” said Gordon Paddison, a former New Line marketing executive, now an independent consultant. “People say Twitter causes a movie to bomb. I say a bad film causes people to trash it on Twitter.”
“I don’t know that it was the people on Twitter who impacted ‘Bruno,’” added Jason Pollock, a consultant on social-media marketing strategy who has 78,000 followers. “Twitter had a pretty small universe last summer, compared to what it is now.”
At the time of “Bruno’s” July 10, 2009, premiere, Twitter had about 50 million users. But that's still less than half the 125 million it touts today. And it's still only about a fifth of Facebook’s current 500 million-plus user count.
Why was everyone in the movie business so excited about Twitter? Probably because of its potential, more than anything. The speed and the scale of word-of-mouth on Twitter seemed to manifest a terrifyingly powerful tool, one in which Hollywood was unprepared for.
The actual reality has been something less.
Surveying 1,500 moviegoers last September, research firm OTX found that as a source for word-of-mouth about films, Twitter actually lagged far behind rival social-streaming platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as just basic interaction with family, friends and co-workers.
Eight out of the top 20 Friday-to-Saturday drops at the box office have come in the last two years. But industry marketers say that’s a much broader story than Twitter.
“I think the viral nature of social media in general can impact a film’s opening, but that’s certainly not limited to Twitter,” said Chris Aronson, executive VP of distribution for Fox.
In fact, it might not be limited to just social media.
“The thing we’ve found that’s actually much more impressive is the amount of people spreading word-of-mouth by texting,” Paddison said. “That dialogue can’t be tracked, but it’s interesting to ask, What is the SMS effect?”
Meanwhile, while the effect of Twitter to hurt a movie is being discounted, the little blue bird is having an effect in other ways.
