DUKKY

Unless you’ve been living under a rock with no access to the Internet for the past couple of weeks, you’re probably aware of the new horror movie “Paranormal Activity.” Like the “Blair Witch Project” 2.0, the low-budget horror movie made a big splash with an innovative marketing campaign that quickly went viral.

Made for only $11,000, the movie has already become highly profitable for Paramount, topping the box office and making $22 million last weekend alone.

How did they do it, and what can we learn from “Paranormal Activity’s” marketing strategy?

Lesson #1: Customers Like to Be Empowered

To promote the movie, Paramount set up a page on Eventful, a site that allows fans to request entertainment events in their cities. Through Eventful, users could demand that the movie be shown near them. Paramount promised that the first city to get enough demands would be the first city to get a midnight screening of the movie. Then, they promised that if the movie got 1 million demands, it would be released nationwide. After Paramount made that promise, the movie hit the 1 million demand mark in just 4 days.

People like to feel empowered-it inspires passion and makes them want to take action. The Paranormal Activity campaign tapped into that passion to turn horror movie fans into powerful advocates.

Lesson #2: Make it Easy for Your Customers to Spread the Word With Social Media

Paramount also made it easy for fans to use social media tools to promote the movie. Both the Eventful page and the official website have “Share” buttons to allow fans to share the movie with friends on the major social networking sites, plus codes for widgets that fans can install on websites and blogs. They also encouraged fans to tweet about the movie live and to share their reactions with @TweetYourScream. “Paranormal Activity” is currently a trending topic on Twitter.

Lesson #3: Social Media is Not Just About Marketing

It’s also about market research, as Sarah Hofstetter of digital communications agency 360i noted in this article on the AdvertisingAge website: “Using social media as a marketing vehicle as well as a market-research vehicle is a major advantage. Not only do they know who’s interested in it from a geographic perspective, they can quantify the demand from a buzz perspective.”

How does this apply to what we do here at Dukky? At Dukky, we use traditional direct response, like direct mail, email and customer correspondence, as a jumping off point for social media-based sharing campaigns. We empower customers to share coupons and offers via social networking sites. Then, we use our analytics system to track the coupons and see who is responding, allowing our clients to create more targeted and effective future campaigns while drastically improving the performance of the current one.

How is your company using social media to connect customers?