Paranormal Activity is a Blair Witch Project-style horror movie made for $15,000.* When Steven Spielberg discovered it, he liked it so much, he considered remaking it. But then, according to Jim Louderback, Spielberg and Paramount Pictures asked themselves: If we launched this using a non-traditional marketing campaign, how far could it get?

Pretty damn far, it turns out. Released October 16, the film has taken in about $65 million so far, including $22 million this past weekend, even though it was at 35% fewer theaters than its competitors. And it's now number 2 at the box office, just below Michael Jackson's This Is It and right above the new Gerard Butler, kill-fest Law Abiding Citizen.

So how did they do it? According to Louderback, CEO of the San Francisco-based Revision3 Internet television network, by eschewing conventional marketing techniques and building their audience by going after "the new influencers."

Deets after the jump.

* Or maybe $11,000. Louderback says $15,000. Entertainment Weekly says $11,000. Either way, a pittance.

Paramount's marketing campaign involved a range of non-traditional approaches, including a Web site where people could "demand" that the movie come to their city and gamer-style leaderboards where visitors could see how many people had demanded it for which cities.

Still, though, they needed to generate that demand for the Web site to work.

On his personal blog, Louderback explains how Revision3 got involved. The network has an audience of about three million young men, testosterone-fueled by definition and tech-savvy by inclination. After Paramount reached out to the company, Revision3 set up a free midnight screening at the Castro theater at the end of September.

Problem was, they only had five days to fill the 1,400 seats. So they tweeted and Facebooked their audience (of course). But they also got the host of their Film Riot show involved (himself a horror movie producer), even flying him out from Miami for the screening. And they dangled the possibility of hanging out with the hosts of other popular Revision3 shows, like Tekzilla and Co-Op, as further inducement to get Revision3 fans to the theater.

The campaign worked. The theater was full up. But that's not all. Louderback estimates that, through their own social networking activities, Revision3 audience members influence on average 100 other people. If you do the math, 1,400 seats x 100 ripple effects = 140,000 pre-qualified Paranormal Activity target audience members touched from this one event.

Revision3 did other things as well, including devoting an entire episode of Film Riot to the movie—which, apparently, has turned out to be a good thing for Revision3 as well. The episode is the show's most highly watched so far, with 300,000 views already and 10,000 new views every day. They've continued to tweet. They posted pictures of the Castro theater event on Flickr. And when Paramount upped the number of theaters the movie would be shown in last weekend, Revision3 viewers got invited to an exclusive party.

"The lessons of Paranormal Activity extend beyond simply creating buzz around a horror flick," Louderback writes. "Leveraging the power of socially connected, engaged audiences, by focusing on the new influencers, can pay tremendous dividends for everything from Apple iPhones to Zappos shoes. It's not just about telling a few friends anymore. When something is good, and with the right fulcrum, social media can move mountains."

Read the whole thing: How Twitter and Social Marketing Will Save the Movies (Louderback.com)