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You can be anyone you want to be on the Internet -- male, female, young, old, a Druid, a troll or a half-lizard from the planet Iksar. You can even pretend to be a wildly enthusiastic fan of a movie that changed your life, when in actuality you have been hired by a studio to surreptitiously create online word-of-mouth or maybe even an entire Web site devoted to its next blockbuster.

Increasingly, studios are employing so-called guerrilla marketing tactics to generate Internet buzz, the apex of which is people alerting their friends in the phenomenon called viral marketing. The idea is that the more intriguing a campaign is created, the more interest a given film will build among Web-savvy moviegoers. And people who have invested their time participating in inventive online promotions are more likely to go to theaters to see that particular movie -perhaps more than once.

"It's definitely no longer satisfactory just to create a Web site," says Jason Yim, CEO of Media Revolution, the self-described integrated marketing agency best known for its work on "Prince of Egypt," "Frequency" and Sony's upcoming "Spider-Man." "We need to drive traffic as well. So, a lot of the work happens behind the scenes at the grass-roots (level) -- things like search engine optimization, message boards, chat rooms."