Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

For all the talk of practical applications of blogging and other social media tools, one of the best uses of these new techniques is to promote movies on the Internet, especially in Ireland.

The reason why movies should be promoted via the net is because word-of-mouth plays such a heavy role in what people decide to see in the cinema. This can be exploited in two ways on the web:

1. Engaging with people directly via blogs
2. Viral campaigns

There is a nice Irish example to use for the first option. There was a ticket giveaway for ‘V for Vendetta‘ at the Irish Blog Awards which worked well for two reasons. The obvious reason was people posted about going to the film and then commented about whether it was any good. The more subtle reason though was the giveaway still got people talking even if they didn’t get tickets. People were asking what the tickets were for and if unfamiliar with the movie, what it was about. Cheap word-of-mouth marketing with a great return on investment.

If you are ever going to run a viral campaign on the Internet, simply come up with an ad that’s going to get banned. Be warned if you search for the following trailer on YouTube, it is not work safe. In the case of Basic Instinct 2, simply post a trailer that would be banned on YouTube and watch the traffic soar. This film distributor will no doubt claim that it had nothing to do with this footage and demand that it is taken down for the sight. Obviously they’ll wait before it reaches critical mass and gets enough people talking about it first though. It’s a simple and effective way to build up a word-of-mouth campaign to build awareness around the movie. In this case you could also leverage some additional press coverage out of it, which the producers of Basic Instinct 2 will no doubt resort to if early reports about the quality of the movie are to be believed.

Technorati Tags: Basic Instinct 2, Irish Blog Awards, Piaras Kelly, PR, V for Vendetta, Viral Marketing, Word of Mouth