Black Swan Society

So I have an idea on how to get people in your organization involved in using social media tools. I think one of the hardest things is getting people over the hump of actually signing up and trying the tools. After one or two active twitter sessions it is hard to deny this is a useful tool, but I took a long time to care enough to sign up. I think something we could do is create a situation in which people would want to use many different social tools to either solve a problem, learn about something, or have some fun. I am currently at GLS and they are using a twitter based game to engage conference goers in the Twitter chat going on during the event. It involved picking words that you thought were twittered a lot. I am proposing we develop a Black Swan ARG that incorporates as many social media networks as possible to try to draw people into using these tools within our respective organizations. If anyone else is interested we can use this thread to plan and design such a game. This would involve us developing a little storyline that would engage people to solve some puzzles and then spread those out across different accounts on the respective social media networks. I think it would be a great effort for this group to engage in but if no one else is interested I guess this will die an embarassing death here on the forums for everyone to see.

I like this idea a lot. I'd be interested in working on it. Kris

I can say this because we're a secret society: F**K YEAH!!!!!!!! This gets me pumped. Peter, that's just a brilliant, subversive, awesome idea. Where do we start?

Sounds great - but only so long as we are not spamming Twitter like SpyMaster or whatever

I'm thinking something along the lines of geocaching but played out in Social Media rather than GPS...

No worries Steve, SpyMaster is terrible with all the tweet spam. I am thinking that we would want to develop challenges or puzzles of some kind that actually exploit the specific afordances of the different social tools. We then tie it all together using a single story line that pulls a thread through them all. It would start something like you get an email that asks you to linkin with someone we've created and maybe that person asks a linked in question that would be interesting enough to get peoples attention but also obscure enough to want them to help the person decode it. Something like "I just got a Twitter from BlackSwan42 and I am not sure what it means, can someone help me? They twitpiced this puzzle and I can't solve it." (obviously we need to work on the story/writting) Or something that would push you to look at twitter and then the twitter account could link to a facebook account, or something else and keep pushing people to use the next social tool and interesting features of each spread out accross the internet. At some level I would think it was best if people came accross it by accedent and didn't realize they were playing a game at all until its too late. I am sure we could incorporate other cool tools like google maps or geocaching if we can come up with an interesting way to include it.

Count me in! I like the idea of pushing them through several different social media products for clues or to actually solve a puzzle - as long as it isn't just for the sake of the product (i.e. ok, let's post one clue here, and one there). The challenges should play to the strengths of each product type (which may even mean you need to use multiple products at the same time). Amongst all of the SoMe resources you all have pointed people to, is there something that identifies what the 'strengths' of each might be? If not, I'm sure we can start constructing something in the BSS wiki, right?