Dave Donohue: nerd-in-residence

Like many PR people, I’m still unsure of the best way for our industry to leverage Twitter. Opinions are developing across the board. On one end, Todd Defren made some good points yesterday calling for PR people to go tweet or go home, and on the other, I know a lot of PR people who agree with Kara Swisher in saying that Twitter is relatively unknown outside the echo chamber. I tend to agree most with Sarah Lacy, posting today that Twitter is slowly but surely becoming well-known outside the tech elite, which means we all need to figure it out sooner than later.

Tonight, we got a lesson in how social media tools - Twitter in particular - can do a lot of damage to a brand in literally minutes. It’s a powerful example of how big companies, working in partnership, spin their wheels while individuals trash them in the blink of an eye. Here’s what went down:

Several Bay Area friends and colleagues planned to attend a screening of Iron Man tomorrow night, one night before the movie’s US premiere, hosted by Mike Arrington and TechCrunch. The movie’s been enjoying good buzz, and it seemed like it was about to get 600 more people buzzing. Right? Wrong.

Check out this timeline (all times EDT):

• 8:15 PM: An attorney at Marvel Entertainment emails TechCrunch a Cease & Desist request, stating that the event was legally out of bounds.
• 8:20: Arrington Tweets this news to his 13,777 followers.
• 8:30-9:00: Over 60 comments are posted to the TechCrunch entry, the vast majority expressing outrage. I can’t remember ever seeing a blog post get so many comments so fast.
• 9:04: Robert Scoble (20,000+ followers) notes that the dispute is “spreading like wildfire on Twitter and Friendfeed“

Things just went downhill for Marvel from there - check Tweet Scan. Social media heavyweights like Jeremiah Owyang (6,562 followers) are tweeting things like “No matter how they approach this, Marvel is going to look bad.” Independent of the Twittersphere, as of this post there are 158 comments on the TechCrunch post, including the phrases “boycott” and “most pirated movie ever”, along with the personal contact information of some really unhappy people on Marvel and Paramount’s PR and legal teams who probably won’t get a ton of sleep tonight.

Oh, and it’s headed straight to the top of Techmeme.  (update Wednesday AM:  Mathew Ingram, Daniel Terdiman, and Dave McClure are just some of the bloggers commenting on the PR aspects of the situation)

This has to have been tortuous for the Hollywood folks. My guess is that the lawyer had no idea how widely read TechCrunch is, the PR people (if they even know about this whole debacle) are mad at the lawyer, and that Marvel doesn’t have a Twitter presence to join a rapidly expanding conversation. The fact that Mike bought the tickets via Paramount and that the theatre, the AMC Metreon, seems to be on his side, only complicates things. That’s a lot of bummed out PR people at three big companies who would have to quickly act in concert to mitigate this, and so far they haven’t been able to. Who knows what they could have done if they were monitoring Twitter.

Twitter might not be that far out of the echo chamber yet, but I bet that tomorrow morning Marvel will vouch for its power in Hollywood. The 600 people who will be in attendance if the show goes on are people who can build good buzz - or share bad buzz in a flash. Iron Man will be #1 at the box office this weekend, but its reputation may already be irreparably tainted in Silicon Valley.