The story of Four Eyed Monsters is one of the earliest and best examples of filmmakers successfully using a range of social media tools. Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, who wrote, directed, produced and starred in the 2005 film, used social media to mobilise a wave of audience support that saw the film screen in cinemas and film festivals while blazing a trail through the digital distribution jungle.

 The film, a loosely autobiographical examination of Buice and Crumley's real-life relationship, was financed solely with a hefty $100,000 credit card debt. The pair were determined that Four Eyed Monsters screen in theatres, so after their January 2005 premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, Buice and Crumley used crowdsourcing to identify clusters of fans who wanted to see the film, resulting in a release in six cities across the US. The fans in these areas were put to work again to identify theatres that might be interested in holding screenings, and the word of mouth generated meant the film screened to increasingly large audiences.

The online campaign to continue to extend the film's audience began on the Four Eyed Monsters MySpace page, where Buice and Crumley made clips of the film available and encouraged visitors to watch 13 episodes of a behind-the-scenes vlog. With fan support growing, the next major distribution innovation for Four Eyed Monsters was to be screened in Second Life. This was quickly eclipsed in June 2007 by the film becoming the first feature film to be shown in its 71-minute entirety on YouTube. Adding to this success was the deal Buice and Crumley scored with the video community site and DVD store Spout.com, which gave them $1 for every recommendation of the film made by a site visitor. In one week, the film had been viewed half a million times on YouTube and the filmmakers had made over $20,000 in referral payments from Spout.com. In addition to their pioneering approach to digital distribution, the filmmakers also had success on film festivals and in more traditional spheres of film promotion and distribution. The 2005 Newport Film Festival awarded them the Student Jury prize and they won Best New Director and Chameleon awards at the Brooklyn Film Festival in the same year. They won the 2006 Sundance Channel Audience Award for participating in the Undiscovered Gems showcase and have also been nominated for two 2007 Independent Spirit Awards: the John Cassavetes Award for Films made for under half a million dollars and Best Cinematography.

The moral of the story is of course, that traditional methods of film distribution are not being entirely replaced by online methods. The two approaches can work well together -filmmakers can reach out to their audience first and build a fan base for a film. Once the buzz has begun, filmmakers can then take that momentum into the offline world for theatrical screenings and film festival appearances. What it comes down to is word-of-mouth. What are the tools that indie filmmakers around the world can use to unleash the phenomenal power of word-of-mouth? Social media of course.