IF A TREE FALLS IN A FOREST AND NO ONE GIVE A STATUS UPDATE ON FACEBOOK, DID IT REALLY FALL?

Professional Movie and Television Reviewers are officially irrelevant. The days when a local daily newspaper or magazine's review could make or break a TV show or a movie's opening weekend are gone and they're not coming back. Although the age of the reviewer is gone, the review itself is not. It's just evolved.

The idea for this blog posting actually came from my boyfriend, who is a religious user of Facebook. A few weeks ago in NYC, after looking up the time and location of a film we were about to see, he went online (Facebook) to see what his friends said about the movie. Did they see the film? Did they like it? What were their personal reviews of the film. In this new digital age, what an "expert" thinks about a film or TV show has no weight with intent to view versus what your peer group and social network thinks about a movie or TV show. As my boyfriend put it, "If it doesn't happen on Facebook, maybe it never happened." And he may very well be right.

The majority of first weekend moviegoers are usually teens. It's estimated that 94% of all moviegoers are online, and of that percentage, 73% are on social networking sites. With "friends" from coast the coast on Facebook, a teenager in California can easily check out what his or her friends in Boston thought about the film before going themselves. Here is an article on this very point: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118009343.html?categoryid=1236&cs=1

As if I needed any more evidence, Nielsen Media Research (whose whole business is audience measurement) recently struck an alliance with Facebook to track the sites online audience: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125356656635628897.html While this article is about tracking advertising responses on Facebook, the natural extension of this business alliance will be tracking word of mouth on media properties.

Prior to social networks, there was no audience metric for tracking word of mouth. No company could possibly count the number of text messages, phone calls or emails people made about a film or TV show, but Twitter and Facebook changed all that. Eventually we will be able to track word of mouth. But tracking word of mouth and then being able to effectively promote it (good word of mouth) or try to turn the tide (bad word of mouth) will be the new digital frontier to ride.

A movie or TV show's success of failure may depend on it.