So Who's Paying For All Of Those Fake 'Bird Box' Tweets?

Let's put aside the insanity surrounding accurately measuring social media interactions and just accept that for a lot of people in Hollywood, it matters how many times a hashtag was used last week or how many people shared memes about a project. Let's forget that "trending on Netflix" doesn't really mean what most people in the industry think it does. They care and as long as they do, being able to show social media heat for the newest television series or movie is as important to some folks as those expensively pointless billboards on Sunset Boulevard.

Where there's a need, there are plenty of people willing to step forward to make money off of the problem. So if you want to generate social media "interest" in your project, there are a number of agencies and small PR firms willing to guarantee results. Sure, they use a lot of fake accounts and other trickery to get the engagement numbers they guarantee. But as long as it's done well, the average person outside of the industry will never know the difference and everyone will end up happy and paid. When it comes to social media promotion, ignorance really is bliss.

Which brings me to the curiously inept social media campaign for the new Netflix movie "Bird Box." It stars Sandra Bullock and it's fair to say the professional reviews of the film have been mixed. So this is a perfect place to try and drive additional interest with some paid-for meme sharing. To be fair, this is a standard way to promote any new project in 2018 and I'm neither shocked nor disappointed it's being used in conjunction with "Bird Box" (a movie I enjoyed, btw).  But the campaign is notable because of how inept parts of it seem to be.

Looking around on Twitter at accounts that used the #BirdBox hashtag, I began to notice an unusual number of accounts that seem to have been created solely to promote the film and share a couple of "Bird Box" memes. New accounts with almost no followers. Accounts that had only tweeted about the movie or tweeted a couple of mundane things before raving about the film. Some of these accounts were following each other or following a third account that seemed to devoted to promoting some other project.

It's all quite clumsy and not at all the way most companies that try to game the Twitter system approach the task. Most of those firms have a bank of long-established Twitter accounts and they hide the interlinking of the accounts in a much more clever way. The only thing I found clever about this social media campaign was that some of the accounts that tweeted #BirdBox memes had been in existence for a number of years. But still had only tweeted #BirdBox-centric stuff. Which generally means whomever controls those accounts deletes the tweets once the marketing plan is over, removing proof of the campaign.

So who is paying for this sad sack social media plan? Netflix would be the logical first guess although the company ignored my requests for more information on their "Bird Box-related" PR efforts. But if nothing else, this is a good reminder that all of that social media excitement you see about a new project may be the entertainment world equivalent of "Fake News."