The Twitter Effect… Is There One?

Today The Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz Blog published a piece titled ‘Basterds’ is Twitter Age’s first true success story.  The post starts off with the statement, “Finally, a Twitter effect that benefits a movie instead of hurts it.” …But is there really a “Twitter effect”?

While there is certainly no shortage of opinions regarding Twitter’s value, there is a lack of definition in terms of its function.  Last week Dan Rayburn, EVP of StreamingMedia.com, blasted Twitter in his blog saying, “I think it is by far the most over-hyped, over-rated Internet application I’ve seen in the past fifteen years.”  I agree that Twitter is massively over-hyped.  However, that does not negate the presence of a Twitter effect.  In fact, it fuels it.  The Twitter effect, as so eloquently put by Gary Vaynerchuk, is simply word of mouth on crack.

Chris Thilk of Movie Marketing Madness did a great job of putting the Twitter effect in context for the Industry in his post today:

“Word of mouth has always been the primary tool by which a movie lives or dies after its first weekend.  The marketing campaign is responsible for making a movie a success Friday through Sunday but then it quickly dies out, with only a handful of ads and other materials that are put in place after that point.  So it’s then word-of-mouth from the moviegoers that sustains or kills it.  All Twitter – or Facebook or Flixster or blogs or anything else – does is speed that up.  So, as I’ve stated before, studios don’t have a Twitter problem, they have a word-of-mouth problem because their movie isn’t meeting audience expectations…it’s not like we’re dealing with a completely new paradigm, just an exponential increase in the reach of that paradigm.”