In part one, I discussed some of the fundamentals of building a cinema community that is engaging. In this part I’ll go a little further into the social aspects of such a community.
Building out from the fact that you can track, rate and recommend films, engaging in some form of debate around the merits of those films would be useful. People love to talk about films, and there are plenty of forums around to do just that but those forums don’t know a huge amount about your film habits. They can’t tell you that a discussion has just kicked off on a film you recently watched, that people are discussing a forthcoming sequel or that it’s actually a poor quality knock-off of another film. By tying the discussion of films into tracking and recommendation, you can do all of those things and more.
While the last thing the world needs is yet another social network, having some connections between accounts would be of great benefit. If I’m looking to go and see a film with a particular friend or friends, it would be easy to check the films we all want to see automatically and recommending it, rather than picking through them one by one. Turn this around: if I want to see a certain film but don’t know who wants to see it, the site could easily give me a list of my friends who also want to see it. Slightly different, have all my friends been raving about some new film that I don’t know about? Well, let me know and I can add it, see it and join in that conversation. There are a lot of interesting possibilities here.
Next, throw location into the mix and you can power another bunch of community-building features. If I genuinely don’t know anyone who wants to see a film, maybe there are some other like-minded people in my area that would like the company. A little feature to negotiate a time or set up a meeting and you get more people through the door, and a happier audience.
Probably more interesting is using the recommendation features and location together to build film groups. A bunch of people in the same area all like horror films? Encourage them to start a group to go and see all the new scary movies that appear, and discuss it later. You wouldn’t even necessarily need location for this: you could add film groups to the forum and have people across the country discuss their favourite zombie movie.
I hope I’ve shown that a handful of features, mixed and remixed, can drive a hell of a lot of interesting behaviour that would benefit the movie-going public and make a cinema chain stronger.