Stareatthegoat.com - The Men Who Stare at Goats online

There was a little ad in the G2 section of The Guardian yesterday, so I took a quick piccie on the iPhone:



I recognised the colours and obviously the whole staring at goats thing as to do with The Men Who Stare at Goats, an imminent film release based on a book by British journalist Jon Ronson. I checked out the stareatthegoat.com site out of interest, and guess what.



Yep, it's a crazy, staring goat. It's actually a LoveFilm microsite, although I'm not sure of the connection between the DVD rental company and a cinema release, at this stage. Unless they imagine it's going to be a slow burner.

Stareatthegoat.com also links to the Facebook Fan Page, which has a total of 163 fans. Not brilliant testament to tremendous engagement with the ad, but it is absolutely bursting with content and even demonstrating wider social listening by highlighting things like that Queen Rania of Jordan had tweeted to her over 1 million followers about loving the film, and various other bits of PR, interviews, clips and the like.



There's also a Twitter profile, @stareatgoats, tweeting the same sort of stuff as is on the Facebook fan page, and retweeting the odd comment. Not especially conversational, which might explain the fact it's following far more people than are following it.



The main site www.themenwhostareatgoatsmovie.com is the movie's main site, all slick and featuring downloads, trailers, even a couple of mind-bending games.



There's also, and it may not be official but it doesn't seem entirely personal, Stareatgoats.com. It is a two-post blog done on Wordpress.



It's intended to explain more about the story behind the movie, and is written in a bloggy style. There's an introductory post that emphasises the role of spoonbender extraordinaire Uri Geller in the inspiration for the book. There's a second post, posted on the same day at the end of September, about Telekinesis, which is related to the theme of the film. The post links to You Tube videos and encourages you to look into telekinesis yourself. And that's it. It also mentions how funny the film is, aside from Ewan McGregor's accent. Just self-effacing enough to make me think it's designed to catch a bit of buzz. The url is my main clue, though.

There's no You Tube channel from what I can find, although there is some LoveFilm PPC activity on You Tube to direct to that crazy goat again.

I'm quite excited by the film, and can't be the only one. I think all the activity has been well branded, and I've seen the branding for a while now. It's difficult for films to engage without forcing things, and this seems to have made an attempt without forcing things. Someone has obviously put some time in, and if you want information about the film, there is no shortage of official resource, wherever you look.