Social Media meets Indiana Jones
[Warning: You may want to find out about Twitter and Seesmic before reading on]
Forget microsites and Facebook profiles, online film promotion for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was propelled into the social media stratosphere by some UK web gurus who convinced Paramount to take a gamble and let them cover the film’s press junket in Cannes for the online community.
The aim was to create an active series of conversations via social media tools and the resulting interview footage with Spielberg, Lucas, Ford et al feels extremely intimate, not least by the gang’s use of Seesmic, a real-time video “blogging” service [anyone feel free to describe better!] which has stolen the limelight a little.
sizemore, Gia Milinovich and Daniel Light pitched Paramount through Dan’s work at promotional agency PPC. All of them are what marketing and media professionals would call new media “influencers” (I’m sure they’d cringe to hear that).
Their approach is unique in that they not only utilise the latest social media technologies but really understand communities and how to create engagement – mainly because they live and breath it as part of their everyday lives and haven’t approached this project as marketers but as fans. [Note, the guys weren't paid for their time out there but that's shouldn't make a difference either way].
It all kicked off last week when they started posting on their blogs and Twitter streams that they were headed to Cannes for something but couldn’t say what (they weren’t faking it to drive hype). People who know them online started swapping theories.
Then they headed in to prep the Seesmic community for hanging out with some of the world’s biggest film A-listers. Although sizemore & co are active users of Seesmic they didn’t want to just turn up and whack a whole pile of film promo type interviews in there with no community relevance. The night before they were kicking off discussions around topics like “what’s your favourite movie theme tune?” and “which action hero would you like to see make a comeback?”. They then took these questions to the interviewees to enable them to join the discussions, not just broadcast one way.
One of the stand-out moments of the community in action was when delboydare AKA Derek Mantle logged in on Saturday morning with his daughters aged 8 and 6 and began “tweeting” questions for Cate Blanchett. The team threw the scripted questions away and asked her direct. A press weary Cate visibly softens at the questions, says hello and offers a response (with maybe a teensy tiny spoiler).
Other great moments was Seesmic members finding out (via google natch) that it had recently been Lucas’ birthday, so they sang Happy Birthday to the tune of Star Wars, not to mention community members’ chuffed reactions at seeing their film heroes share, or not share, the same preferences or opinions as them.
It’s all been incredibly experimental with some fantastic results and the guys have done an outstanding job. They’ve taught us a lot about how marketing “doesn’t feel like marketing” when people actually want to hear the info available. In fact, it’s not marketing at all, it’s really just a conversation.
