Using Twitter at Pixar: Inside Out

I’m a huge Pixar nerd, and Inside Out is one of their best works. The movie touches upon the core of human emotion as we peer inside Riley’s head to witness the interactions of the emotions of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. Lauded by children, adults, and psychologists, the film is almost universally loved. Vanity Fair went so far as to say that it might become more influential than the Divine Comedy.

I don’t use Twitter because I don’t like the idea of being limited in text, and I still don’t understand all of the abbreviations. But, I think Twitter would be a great medium for Pixar to communicate with its fans through the lens of Inside Out.

Pixar could create Twitter feeds for each of the emotions — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. Each of these accounts could link to the main Inside Out account which could link to the main Pixar account allowing users to easily navigate and jump between the feeds. Each of the feeds, would embody that specific motion. The Joy feed would be happy, the Sadness feed melancholy, and so on.

When a fan posts to the Inside Out feed, each of the emotions could individually respond to the fan. For example, if someone were to post “Tomorrow, I’ll watch Inside Out for the 2nd time,” the emotions could respond in the following manner:

Joy: Inside Out again! Mom loved it, I’m sure Dad will too!!

Sadness: Movies are never as good the second time.

Fear: Movie theaters are dark, should I really venture back?

Anger: Why are there no other good movies playing?

Disgust: Ugh, my sister won’t appreciate the movie.

I believe this type of social marketing has a strong potential to go viral. For one, it creates an aura of selectivity. Pixar doesn’t have the resources to respond to every tweet five times, so their social media moderator will selectively choose the best tweets to respond to. This will create demand and increase the number of tweets/followers for Twitter and also ensure the most interesting tweets are responded to. Furthermore, the marketing campaign captures the essence of the film — how emotions interact to create a composite image. Even people who hadn’t seen Inside Out would see the breadth and scope of Pixar’s vision of peering inside a girl’s mind. It may attract people to watch the film who otherwise would have written the animated feature off as a kid’s film.

Finally, this campaign would give more character to the individual emotions potentially creating more demand for Inside Out emotion specific toys, one of Pixar’s largest revenue streams.