Our office is celebrating a new attempt in the world of programming, the scavenger hunt through Twitter!
We called it the "iHunt" (after much debate!) and our student marketing coordinators for our office ran this as a project. I love that I get the chance to brag about their great event on this blog and can also share some of our learning from our first event held on Twitter with all of you.
Before I go through the specifics, you should know that our campus is just barely dipping our toes into this Twitter pool. A few of us are tweeting and some of our programs and offices are getting started with it, but we are just barely setting forth on what many campuses have already accomplished through using this exciting tool. We knew we were starting and needed to build followers, so the iHunt was born!
Now that I've let our "social media newbie" status leak to the public, I hope you realize that this can be adopted by everyone! Here's how it went down:
- We chose one account that we wanted to build through this event and made that account the central account. We didn't use a hashtag (#) because our goal was to increase followership. (Warning: If this hashtag reference confuses you… seek a Twitter tutorial on YouTube and then come back!)
- Pre-event advertising was done using the typical channels. To sign up, students had tweet a full name to the designated account and sign up to follow (in order to get clues).
- Once the hunt started. we tweeted clues and the participants had to tweet back for certain numbers of points. We did questions based on campus history, departmental programs, events going on that week, and wierd trivia about our staff members. Remember, the goal is to gain followers for our office's Twitter so it was shameless promotion on purpose.
- Our two student marketing coordinators kept running scores and did a mid-week update on who was winning. I also did some incentive points by posting things like "extra five points for getting five new fans of our Facebook fan page to post that you referred them."
- Questions ranged in point values and we made sure that people who had signed up after things got rolling had a chance to catch up through extra effort. There was no rhyme or reason to our point system and it got kind of silly after a while…but we had a blast! (I believe I was awarded a thousand iHunt points for "being awesome" by the end of it)
Our conclusion to this event is going to be a "Tweetup" where we are inviting all the participants and our staff to talk about the event and what we can do to make it huge for next semester!
Overall, this whole event was a real trip! We wanted to run one as a pilot just to see what it would be like and before we set our sights too high and too big. We had goals of large registration with teams, etc. but decided to keep things simple the first time around. I'm glad we did, because…
- Students were HYPED about this! It might have been because it was a new tool to "play" with, but we really did just basic promotion and got great enthusiasm.
- Students were INTENSE about this! When we put out a tweet, we had no idea that they would feel compelled to answer the tweets immediately. It most definitely created drama around the office and stress from the students that was totally not necessary. There was something about the Twitter format that made them feel urgency.
I can't wait to see how this Tweetup goes and will post a Comment on here when it happens. What more do you want to know about this experiment?! Cheers to Web 2.0 and a new platform for "events!"
