Social Seeding Strategy: Dark Knight Rises

Continuing on from my earlier post into The Dark Knight’s social media campaign,  Warner Bros have kick started their seeding strategy for Christopher Nolan’s follow-up The Dark Knight Rises with a 12 month slow burn.

Already the site went live, playing some obscure soundtrack. Some persistent fan managed to slow down the audio and decrypted the message as #thefirerises . Tweeting the phrase fills in a part of an image of one of the main character’s Bane played by Tom Hardy.

In my post, A Guide to Social Media Propagation I outlined the key considerations for establishing a successful seeding strategy. This latest Dark Knight Rises campaign prompted me to realise that what I neglected to mention was the question what is the time plan for delivering the social strategy?

In the case of such an anticipated franchise such as Batman, the strategy could have been to put a news blackout to raise curiosity for the movie’s launch. Rather, like Warner Bros did for The Dark Knight, the digital strategy is built on building up anticipation over the course of 12 months by drip feeding information on the characters and storyline.

Initially the social strategy is relatively basic with a simple microsite and a twitter hashtag to lead the audience to the big reveal. Nevertheless I would predict that a more expansive campaign will take shape in the form of various sites, and across many mediums.

From a digital strategy standpoint I will look forward to documenting how this manifest itself over the coming months and I dare say this will start to move across a number of digital and offline channels.