Every time I’m ready to write off the the Internet, it (almost) always redeems itself. The absurdity of nominating ‘Twitter’ for a Nobel Peace prize left me shaking my head. However just a few days later the Twitterverse, in a shocking display of good taste, collectively panned Bruno, essentially restoring my faith in social media and humanity in general.
Now we are about to see the Twitter monster flex it’s muscle once again as Harry Potter hits theaters tonight at midnight. I expect we’ll see pretty much the exact opposite of the Bruno effect with Harry Potter on Twitter. Now, I have not read the book, nor have I seen the movie yet. But I am fairly confident that so long as it isn’t 90 minutes of tasteless satire and homoerotic visual gaffes, Twitter hype will be an overall positive for Harry.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the trending topics are dominated by Potter references on a scale we haven’t seen since MJ died. There are fan sites across the web already motivating their bases to dominate the social spaces. The Dumbledore Twitter Challenge for example is requesting that Potter fans add a #dumbledore to their Twittering in a 36 hour campaign to make #dumbledore the most Tweeted word on Twitter.
Harry Potter is hardly a franchise that needs a lot of help in the hype department, but it’s going to get it nonetheless. There could also very well be an uptick of Twitter registrations as Potter fans create accounts for the sole purpose of connecting with each other. That will be interesting to see too, so we’ll keep our eyes on that and let you know what we turn up.
