If you haven’t already heard about it, check out the site for Paranormal Activity, a low-budget horror movie.  What’s remarkable about this little movie (aside from it having been made for $30,000 in the filmmaker’s house and grabbing distribution from Paramount) is the way in which they are employing social media, the web and email to sell tickets.  Maketers should pay attention to the variety of ways Paramount is hyping this film and how each piece of their strategy works together.

1. Start with a good movie (product).  Apparently this is a horror movie that actually scares people, which will appeal tremendously to its core audience.  How do we know it scares people?  Because the trailer eschews showing too much footage of the actual film, instead showing us the reactions of a terrified audience as captured by infrared cameras.  Brilliant.  They understand that the audience is going to the film for the experience – to be scared.
2. Paramount is rolling this out slowly in select markets, usually large college towns.  What’s great about this is that on their website they have a Demand It feature which lets you a) fill out a petition requesting they show it in your area and b) see which towns and cities are frontrunners to get screenings and how many votes they are getting.  They are billing this as the “first-ever major film release decided by you!”
3. By “demanding it,” potential audience members provide Paramount with their email address.  This, in turn, allows Paramount to directly market to a high-quality lead, movie tickets for a genre picture they want to see.  My friend Jason signed up for the film and this is what he received one day later: You can buy tickets right from the email.  Short of just sending you the tickets, Paramount has almost completely removed friction from the sales process.
4. Paramount is leveraging Twitter with a promotion called “Tweet your screams.” They are actually building the Twitter conversation from scratch. And collecting Twitter logins while they’re at it.
5. And, of course, you can become a fan on Facebook and share it via all of the other more traditional web-based methods.

This is a very clever use of a lot of different (free or inexpensive) tools.  I will be watching the box office returns on Paranormal Activity to see how this translates into revenue.  And how Paramount uses the database of horror fans it’s building for its next scary movie release.