For a much-anticipated movie release, there are many ways to
hype up the movie. Traditional tactics
such as billboards, trailers, and the stars featured on TV spots are great ways
to get the audience ready for the movie release. The team in charge of building anticipation
for the movie Deadpool did these things, but also took their tactics a few
steps further. Not only did they use
social media to promote the movie with basic tweets from a central Deadpool
page, they also fabricated a twitter fight between Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds
and Wolverine actor Hugh Jackman. If you
aren’t familiar with these two characters, they are both mutants that exist in
the same universe as the X-Men movies.
This ploy was brilliant; it effectively utilized social media’s
interactivity to get people talking about the movie.
In Kietzmann’s "Social Media? Get Serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media," the author describes the seven functional building blocks that define social media, presented as, “identity,
conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups.” Just this discourse between these two actors
about if Deadpool or Wolverine is better uses almost all of these. It gives the followers of these actors a
chance to identify whether they are on the side of Deadpool, or the side of Wolverine. The conversations between Reynolds and
Jackman are publicly seen on their accounts, and are open to other users to
chime in, creating a dialogue within the fan base for them to be in on the
conversation, whether it is with other users or the actors themselves. Here is an example of fan art that was tweeted at both Jackman and Reynolds, where both of them responded, and Jackman's response is shown.
On a side note, in Kaplan’s "Users of the World
Unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media," Kaplan urges the social media campaign to be interesting and
unprofessional. Here, the two go hand in
hand; the unprofessional nature of these exchanges between Jackman and Reynolds
are what makes the feud interesting. One
of the other uses of the functional building blocks described by Kietzmann is
that this twitter 'fight' allows for the actors to have a continuous presence
on the platform, where they can go back and forth with each other leading up to
the movie release for, in this case, Deadpool, but this ‘fight’ goes further
than that. The genius in this strategy
is that these two can keep going back and forth with each other for the
upcoming Wolverine movie “Logan” as well as for the lead up to Deadpool 2 which
is in the making currently.
(https://twitter.com/VancityReynolds/status/838514592053538816)
This looks
to be one of the more unconventional social media campaigns that I’ve seen, but
one that is extremely effective. The
effectiveness in using Twitter’s platform to have the stars engage in a feud
where the other users, the fans, can get involved in the action is exactly why
social media is thriving. Not only did
this campaign get the fans involved, it was an additional way to excite the
fans without pushing content like teasers in their face, and that subtle aspect
is what makes this campaign so great.
Sources:
Kaplan, Andreas M., “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities
of Social Media,” Business Horizons (2010) 53, 59-68 (PDF)
Kietzmann J.H. et al., “Social media? Get Serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social Media,” Business Horizons (2011) 54, 241-251
Kietzmann J.H. et al., “Social media? Get Serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social Media,” Business Horizons (2011) 54, 241-251
https://twitter.com/VancityReynolds/status/838514592053538816
No comments:
Post a Comment