I think it is a definite reflection on the direction that social marketing is taken when Twitter is being used to predict box office hits, misses and general forecast number, with very good accuracy considering the nature of the subject, the old tweet.
As i read the BBC i saw an article about Computer scientists from the HP lab of social computing analysed about 3 million tweets from about 25 movies. First off it is great to see more quantitative data, as it starts to give a better handle on the larger scale influences social networking has on our lives. So the fact corporations like HP have taken the impact so seriously they have allocated resources and an entire department, dedicated to trends and scientific analysis of the Facebook, Foursquare and others on our lives outside of the web.
image via flickr
Dr. Bernardo Huberman who is the head of the social computing lab at HP noted something important, all-be-it slightly intuitive,
“Our intuition was that the faster people tweet, the more likely they are to go and see it.”
This is essentially “Buzz” which anyone who has had to do any marketing is exactly what you want to generate interest and attract potential readers/clients/customers/donors/viewers to whatever your product is, movies, corporate sites, blogs or otherwise.
In all honesty some of the box office predictions are quite accurate, and were done using the US movie box office as a base for this analysis. Unfortunately the page with the actual results wasn’t available but i will search to see if i can find the actual paper these guys put together.I must admit though, i am really curious as to what the formula and methodology is behind this:
| Movie | Release Date | Projected Twitter Box Office Total | Actual Box Office Total | Difference in Totals |
| Crazies (IMDB) | Feb. 2010 | $16.8m | $16.06m | $200, 000 |
| Dear John (IMDB) | Feb. 2010 | $30.71m | $30.46m | $250, 000 |
One thing that they did note is the demographic of technologically inclined, younger Tweeters, so as a person of active, tweeting age (we will assume above at least 9 at this point) would likely not be tweeting about a new childrens’ movie, even thought it the movie may be a financial success. The reason being a person within that age wouldn’t be fighting in line with some 6th graders to get into a childrens’ movie.
But being able to analyse Twitter in this way and get such close result for box-office sales, it would be interesting to see what other social experiments could be conducted, and what are currently underway, hmmmmm….
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- Twitter predicts box office hits (news.bbc.co.uk)
