Films, buzz, and present choices in past tense

When asked to choose a research topic, I was genuinely interested in tracing how people made specific choices say, 10 years ago, and how one would go about doing the same today with the aid of social media. Hence, taking a very basic – but nevertheless deeply embedded in social media example – films, I would like to research buzz influenced decision-making habits for cinema goers today versus the respective offline scenario 10 years ago. The emerging differences will serve to assess to what extent people’s choices have become a function of digital and specifically social content and how this shapes their decisions.

Focusing on online conversations and buzz is something everyone in the SM industry is probably used to by now to the point of doing it subconsciously. This is probably the case even for the general public – people are strongly aware of the abundant word-of-mouth content spread online and, consciously or not, tend to turn to it when making decisions about anything, from which printer to buy to which hotel to stay in when travelling. Our dependence reliance on social networks and services has grown rapidly in the past years, and it is fair to say that my generation (I am 22) has pretty much grown up “online”, in conversation with others, proactively contributing to the whole buzz community build up. Quoting Michael Hackmer:

“On the one hand you have a generation that grew up in an industrial age – mass production, large institutions, standardizations….Now you have a new generation that does not respond to that structure. It’s built on demassification, individualism, and customization.”

I would like to draw attention to the latter term, “customization”, which from a social media perspective translates into the ability to choose from a set of conversations depending on what it is you want to hear. Platforms such as review websites, social networks, services, blogs, vlogs, and everything in-between give us customization options to extract searched-for content and usually trust the sentiment. It wasn’t always like this however and previous generations know well there is an “offline” way to making choices without feeling uninformed or socially disconnected.

In order to build solid comparisons between the past and today however, I will need your assistance. If you enjoy going to the cinema and use social networks or websites, then please click here to take my survey fitted around the research objectives I mentioned above. Confidentiality and data privacy will be strictly kept and used only for statistical purposes.

In my next post I will present my hypothesis (which I will not share at this time to omit bias), the insights to be gained from a decision-maker perspective and the actual result statistics. My final post will explore the data more broadly with the ultimate objective to provide a better understanding of online consumer habits and behaviours, the extent to which people have taken up the role of critics and how all this benefits decision-makers.