Did Twitter Boost Inglourious Opening?
Who saw Inglourious Basterds this weekend besides myself? Well, in case you haven’t I strongly recommend you go see it. It was the best movie I have seen so far this year. Mashable had a very interesting post about the success of the movie: Read it here
What the people at Mashable believe is that positive Tweets about the movie lead to an increased sales at the box office opening weekend. They found that after crawling all the Tweets about the movie, a whopping 78% of them were positive. Some believe that this high level of positive Tweets helped send more people to their local cinemas this weekend.
This is not the first time that Twitter may have influenced movie sales. A Twitter backlash on the second day of Bruno is said to have hurt the movies revenue substantially (see previous wwwwY post). This current example would be an example of Twitter helping a movie at the box office.
This real world example shows the two main strengths of Twitter. First, obviously Twitter can drive purchase. Twitter helps you expand your network, and when you see people raving about a movie, you are more likely to go based on the personal recommendation. I myself saw a Tweeted personal recommendation for the Inglourious Basterds weeks ago from a very funny individual, Sara Silverman. Her strongly positive Tweet helped put the movie on my radar.
The second benefit for a company to use Twitter is the ability to monitor perceptions. Not only did the Tweets drive people to see the movie, but Twitter gave the movie studios a real time look at opinions of the movie. This is very beneficial for a company which provides a tangible product or service. Real time feedback on every aspect of your product is invaluable. You can look for potential fires and put them out before the become damaging blazes.
So please use this current real world example as a case study in why you should use Twitter for business. In can boost your sales, let you monitor your: product feedback and brand image…
oh… and recommend a great movie.
Go see Inglourious…
Follow Todd on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/toddliss
who what where when Y 
Quentin Tarintino plus Brad Pitt plus movie aboout killing nazis plus good reviews = Big Box office dollars.
Twitter doesn’t even rank in that story. If the movie is good of course people will be talking about it. Transformers sucked ass and I am sure people tweeted about that but it still dominated.
Twitter gets thoughts out faster. Usually stupid thoughts (see todd’s twitter page for example, cool todd you are working out real interesting) but how many people will get a good word from someone on their cellphone then that day go see the movie? I don’t think so. That movie had huge hype before it opened, the way to test twitter is if Sunday sales are higher then expected, then we will know that twitter has made a difference.