My family recently spent a rainy Saturday morning watching upcoming movie trailers via the “Front Row” app that came bundled with our Mac.

I wryly noted that they would likely only see 10% of the actual movies — which led me to wonder if Social Media could be better leveraged to make the maxim, “Hollywood’s business is America’s business” even more of a truism.

After all, when it comes to marketing, Social Media’s power is derived from the ability for consumers and brands to directly interact.

Yet when it comes to movies, it’s a more significant challenge: you’ve heard pundits (like me) say over and over again that doing Social Media “right” means thinking in terms of relationships not campaigns.

But movies are by their nature short-term and event-based — so campaign-thinking is 100% appropriate.  And unless you’re a one-in-a-million, really focused brand like Pixar, you can’t expect a movie studio to do a good job on the relationship-side: there’s no built-in loyalty to the studios themselves, and, anyway, each of the studios’ cinematic products target wholly different audience segments.

So far, the most ambitious marketing efforts — e.g., for 2012, the current box-office champ — add iPhone apps (“do you have the right survival skills?”), Twitter profile wallpaper, and fake websites to the usual crop of intriguing billboards and teaser trailers.

Given the movie’s reigning-champ status, you can’t argue that 2012’s campaign was not successful.  Yet as Chris Thilk of Movie Marketing Madness pointed out in his examination of the campaign: “Despite the impressive reach of the marketing – all those posters, all those websites, all those TV commercials – the campaign winds up feeling like the same sort of superficial spectacle the movie will likely be. It’s all glam…”

So how do you build a relationship built on the one-time event of a movie?

My best answer is that that relationship must start far earlier, and, I wonder if the studios should take more risks on user empowerment…

For example, I grew up reading the pulp fiction tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  (Yea, Tarzan. I cop to it.)  I was also an ardent 10–year old fan of Burroughs’s second-most popular character, John Carter of Mars. Back in 2005, Jon Favreau was slated to direct a film version of my childhood fantasy, and I spent too many hours on IMDB chat boards (fruitlessly, blithely), wrangling with fellow geeks re: issues such as casting, tone, etc.

Granted, I am one of the Ain’t It Cool News variety of geek whom the studios have essentially nailed down…

But, imagine a scenario in which consumers get very early word of a tentpole release, and can use Social Media outlets like Facebook to vote not just on minor issues like “Who’s your favorite character?” (as the marketers of Alice in Wonderland recently handled quite well), but also fundamental questions like, “Who should play the protagonist?”

Imagine a no-holds-barred global casting call in which a pre-determined selection of — say, 5 actors — was subjected to a reality-tv style vote that took place across several weeks, for a major studio release.  Each actor’s Facebook Fan Page could include their screen test, their bio, oodles of shareable content, etc., as well as the to-and-fro message boards where the actors could interact with their fans and guide them to ever-more-interesting acts of promotion on their behalf.

You could create a Facebook Connect app that automagically places the famous actor within your own FB photos — which you could re-post in your newstream, for all your friends to see, comment on, and gain their own participation.

The actors could give anyone who tweets 50X about their vote in the contest a personalized photo, or access to a special Twitter avatar, or raffle off a trip to see them on-set.

And of course when the final casting decision is made, it’s kept secret until the teaser trailer is released — and it’s released first off to that actor’s biggest fans, who would likely spread it like wildfire.

What I am talking about here, with this one (quickly-brainstormed) concept, is personalizing the moviemaking process from its earliest possible origins.

Keep in mind that there are many potential reasons to see a movie. Maybe you’re a fan of the director.  Or of the actors.  Or of the movie genre.  Or of the original book on which a movie is based.  Broken down like that, you can quickly envision ways to engage each of these psychographic groups in such a way that they invest themselves — for differing reasons — in the movie’s development … which guarantees that these newly-minted ambassadors spend time promoting it when the premiere finally rolls around.

In other words, they’ll truly make Hollywood’s business their personal business.

But I am no expert on movie marketing.  What thoughts do you have?

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