One of the areas I follow for ESG is media and entertainment. I caught some interesting articles in the trade rags today about the impact Twitter had on the weekend box-office take for the new Bruno movie(http://www.indiewire.com/article/cinemadaily_07.14.09_blaming_it_all_on_twitter/#When:19:11:31Z, http://www.thewrap.com/article/summer-box-office-twitter-effect_4229?page=1 , http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/13/did-twitter-cost-brüno-millions).
Opening night did well, Friday night’s take topped $14M. With the strong opening night, the pundits projected a $50M weekend, but the entire weekend take barely cleared $30M. Why the tail off? According to some, it was the Twitter effect. Early Twitter reviews of the movie were, to put it mildly, not that good. In one of the articles, author Sharon Waxman claims that thanks to the speed at which word of mouth travels in social media, “the weekend box office has now shrunk to a single day: Friday.” What used to take a week or so to become broadly disseminated – movie reviews – now happens in real time from real people, and the business impact is immediate. Think about it – could Twitter have actually cost Bruno’s backers $20M in revenue?
We all saw an example of Social Media’s impact in the storage world a month or two ago when HDS was trounced by the storage industry Twitterati as lacking depth and sufficient substance for all the buzz it was making when it announced its High Availability Manager. Many in the storage world expected a new platform or major platform refresh – so an announcement about front end clustering fell short. Thanks to Twitter, HDS was immediately placed on the defensive and was attacked from all angles. At that time, Steve blogged about the speed and efficiency of Twitter as a platform to instantly get the word out about something – anything – and the beating HDS was taking. The fact that HDS never set false expectations didn’t matter – for whatever reason, certain people expected certain things and when it didn’t happen, they found that they had an immediate means to voice their disapproval. But I don’t think the full meaning of what happened really hit home for me until I saw the actual dollar impact of a stream of negative tweets, granted its based on a consumer market – movie theater revenue – but there is a lesson to be learned here about the power of instant mass communication.
Last week, we saw a more positive Twitter impact (is that a Twimpact?) when Rackspace had an outage and used Twitter as a mass communications platform to keep users apprised of the actions it was taking and the status of its data center. The bad news though, thanks to Twitter, an awful lot of people knew about the outage immediately. But Rackspace used social media to its full advantage and communicated openly, honestly, and often, probably saving thousands of dollars in avoided call center incident handling and tracking. Rackspace’s transparency means a lot, it creates an atmosphere of trust. We all know that no technology is perfect, but it is not the failures that make or break companies, it is how the failures are handled that does.
The potential social media impact is unprecedented, in both a positive and negative sense: it is the telephone game on steroids. A lot of companies understand the possible impact of social media, it has become a permanent fixture in both our personal and professional lives, but we all still have a lot to learn.
