Sign up FAST! Login

Twitter Goes to the Movies - WSJ.com


Stashed in: Twitter!, Are You Not Entertained?

To save this post, select a stash from drop-down menu or type in a new one:

Man, actor of valor is an exceptional film.

This is the second time Ive heard of this company in the last week:

Several studios, including Paramount and CBS Films, have begun using tools devised by a five-year-old Boston company called Crimson Hexagon. Founded by a Harvard professor, the company has access to Twitter's entire "fire hose," every public tweet that's ever been written since 2010. The company's algorithm analyzes "unstructured text"—the colloquial way people speak on social media—to answer specific questions about consumers' desire for various products, including movies. For example, it can search for tweets, blogs or Facebook comments from people comparing "Ted" to "The Hangover."

Crimson Hexagon has about 100 customers across industries, ranging from General Motors to Twitter itself, who pay more than $100,000 a year for access to its intelligence. In a conference room in a tower overlooking Boston Harbor, a team of Crimson Hexagon executives demonstrated how recent research revealed that social media comments are tightly correlated to opening-weekend box office. By looking at the volume of tweets expressing "intent to view" (such as "I'm dying to see the new Bourne film!") across seven different movies—including "The Hunger Games," "The Dictator," "Act of Valor" and others—they observed a 98.8% correlation with actual gross revenue per theater. Chief Executive Patricia Gottesman cautioned that it's unclear to what extent social media is creating, as opposed to responding to, the buzz about a given film.

You May Also Like: