Is the 'Twitter Effect' on box office just big-media hype?

In the past few months, I've been reading story after story about the Twitter Effect, all of them essentially saying that movies like "Bruno" may have suffered unprecedentedly precipitous drop offs in their opening weekend audiences thanks to the speedy proliferation of bad buzz from Twitter-happy moviegoers. As Time magazine's Richard Corliss put it recently: " 'Bruno's' box-office decline from Friday to Saturday indicates that the film's brand of outrage was not the sort to please most moviegoers -- and that their tut-tutting got around fast. 'Bruno' could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter effect."

But is it really Twitter or just regular old-fashioned word of mouth being spread more rapidly than ever by all sorts of instant communications tools -- texting, Facebook page updates, etc? OTX, one of the movie industry's leading market research firms, recently did an in-depth survey of movie buzz that came to a surprisingly contrary conclusion -- the Twitter Effect is overrated.

"Our research found a significant overestimation of the Twitter Effect," Kevin Goetz, the president of OTX's worldwide motion picture group, told me. "The number of people who use Twitter are only about 10% to 12% of all moviegoers. And when we asked people what was the most influential source of moviegoing word of mouth, Twitter finished last, at the bottom of the list."

OTX did an online survey of nearly 1,500 moviegoers in mid- September, the bulk of the sample being moviegoers from age 13 to 49, the key moviegoing demographic group. When asked what was the most influential source for word of mouth, most respondents picked "family and friends and coworkers," which scored 40%, followed by Facebook (31%), MySpace (9%), IMDB (8%), with Twitter and online message boards bringing up the rear with 6% each.

"The data suggests that all the media play for the Twitter Effect is really jumping the gun," says Vinnie Bruzzese, the exec VP of OTX's motion picture group. "It has an impact, but it's coming much later on, not as initial reaction. There may be people with a lot of followers on Twitter, but the most influential people in terms of word of mouth are still the people you're talking to every day -- your friends and co-workers."

The data offered similar results when word of mouth was broken down into more specific categories: very influential, somewhat influential and not at all influential. Friends and family still led the very influential category, with Twitter and online message boards ranking last. Bruzzese says that age wasn't a defining factor either. "We didn't see a teen effect at all. The teen numbers for Twitter weren't substantially different, in terms of word of mouth influence, from the older age groups."

It's not exactly a shocker that the mainstream media has once again blindly jumped on the bandwagon and wildly overstated the importance of a new social media tool. It seems like just yesterday when MySpace was being touted as a revolutionary social media platform, only to quickly lose steam and cachet in the online world. On the other hand, Twitter does seem like a perfect mechanism for quickly sharing information, so I asked a studio marketing chief for his reaction to the OTX survey.

"I'm not shocked," he said. "Twitter isn't a marketing tool, it's an observational tool. What it is really useful for is to eavesdrop in on a number of private conversations about a movie. You can quickly tell if people are all trending toward liking it or hating it. I think over time it will have more influence. But for now, what you're really getting with Twitter is the leading edge of opinions. It's a small percentage of moviegoers, but it's a very vocal, viral group -- like a online version of a ComicCon convention, floating around every weekend. So as a group, it probably has an influence far beyond its numbers. But can Twitter bring down a movie? Probably not."

He laughed. "I'd say it's still just one of many kinds of instant buzz that make it tougher than ever to be a movie marketer."   

Comments

[Todd]

So Twitter is just visible WOM...and being the most visible WOM tool marketers have yet to be able to witness, they're attributing bad BO (that's box office...or not...depending on how bad the movie is) to Twitter. Thusly, they're killing the messenger.

I could get behind that.

[Chris Dorr]

It always interesting to see how a question is framed. For example if I walk out of a theatre and use my twitter account to tell my friends about a movie I have just seen is that message "word of mouth" or is it "twitter"? If I use "sms" to inform my friends about a movie is that "word of mouth" or is it "sms"? If I place a voice call to a friend to talk to them about the movie is that "word of mouth" or is that "cell phone"? If my twitter account automatically updates my Facebook when I use my cell phone to send a message, is that message "word of mouth" or is it twitter, Facebook and cell phone? These are all the ways that people communicate with each other today and there will be more and more over the year ahead. This just shows that Hollywood doesn't know much about their customers and how they communicate if it all gets reduced to "Twitter" or some other communication platform.

[disgruntled viewer]

I just found about this column via twitter.

[Jonathan Dana]

There is probably some 'smudging' whereby the phrase 'twitter effect' really means a more generic speeding up of the word-of-mouth process than just the opinion of the twitter users themselves. Although I did myself wonder about the narrowly defined twitter impact when Ashton Kutcher's 1 million plus followers couldn't generate a pulse for his recent, and quite entertaining, film, "Spread."

[Kim Williams]

"OTX, one of the movie industry's leading market research firms, recently did an in-depth survey"

lol..OTX is a joke and considered a scam marketing company whose survey are sabotaged by their respondents because they will have you take a 45 minute survey and when you get to the point where you have to enter your personal information you get an error message and no compensation or they tell you, you don't qualify after you have just completed the whole survey.

On the online forum site SlickDeals there is a whole thread in their survey section dedicated to thousands of unhappy OTX survey takers that think OTX should be banned .

Jaglo87 the OP(original poster) of the thread states;

"Who here hate OTX surveys? BAN OTX SURVEYS!!!!!!
MAn i hate that freakin OTX surveys everytime its the same question and ends with the same results either try to qualify for another survey or nothing i'm sick and tired of the OTX survey they are everywhere there is nothing i hate more that the stupid OTX surveys. if you see them dont do them that'll teach me a lesson hopefully if no one does them they will get rid of them. i really hope they freaking get rid of them that would be awesome "

I would not consider any of the survey numbers in this article any where near the truth when you consider the source(OTX).

[David]

So there is NO TWITTER EFFECT? Oh, I get it. Since so many viewers panned Bruno on Facebook instead of Twitter, we can ignore it.
Wheew! I thought there might be something for the industry to pay attention to, but no, the movie industry and Patrick Goldstein can go back to sleep now.