Social Media Game: Hawaiian Version - Beta - My Contribution to Hawaii Geek Week

Photo by Dan Zen

It's Hawaii Geek Week!   Here's my contribution. Part of the Hawaii Social Media Club Workshop. 

The Social Media Game

The goal of game:   There's no winners or losers.  The game is intended to help you think through a social media strategy and share tips and knowledge.

Instructions for Playing

1.    Introduction: Overview the key concepts in the game.  I need to create a very brief (10 minutes) high level overview of the tactical strategies, time, and potential resistance areas. I won't be going over the tools in detail as many will have been discussed during the early part of the day and they can ask one another in their small groups.  I will also give an overview of the rules.  I will hand out the tactical cards for reference.

2.   Objective: Divide into small groups.  Each group will be assigned an instructor/facilitator.   Each group will select one objective card at random. (5 minutes)

Here's an example:

Photo by Bitmask

TOURISM CAMPAIGN

You are a campaign team for a local tourist office and you want to get visitors to Hawaii to enjoy your local restaurants, hotels, and attractions. You would like to use social media to educate tourists who have select Hawaii as a destination to come off the beaten path. You also want to build relationships with people who have visited so they will return or tell others.

3.   Audience: Next, each group will get a set of "people" cards.  I created most of the cards using the social technographics model from Forrester that is described in detail in the book Groundswell by Josh Bernhoff and Charlene Li.  (I'm hoping that participants will have viewed or seen Chris Heuer's video interview with Charlene as part of the promotion of the workshop.  Participants will be asked to consider who the audience might be for the various scenarios and how they might learn more about what they are doing on the social web.   I've included a card that points to these other free research sources but will also warn folks from getting bogged down with too much research and not enough action.  (15 minutes)

4.  Tool Cards:  Each group will get a pack of tool cards and choose tools to implement the online strategy to reach their objective.  Each tool is worth a certain amount of points and each group can only have up to ten points.   (I might need to tweak the point value).    (15-20 minutes)

5. Real Situations:  When the group is done with their strategy,  they will pick a situation card at random.  The situations include resistance, staffing, budget, time, experimentation, and metrics.   Depending on the situation, they can gain or lose points.  Once they pick the situation card, they revise their strategy.   If time permits, will let groups pick another strategy card. (15-20 minutes)

6. Full Group Report:  Each group will present their strategy to the full group and get feedback.

Almost two years ago,  I did a workshop with David Wilcox in Birmingham for LASA. We created a new game version (Social Media Game) based on those Drew Mackie and he had developed over the past 10 years. (You can find David's training games here.)   He has reiterated this game over and over for different audiences and circumstances and I've remixed the game for filmmakers and even took it to Cambodia.  I set up a wiki where I've collected links to others who have remixed and was hoping to create some templates and source material for people to remix it.

Next week, I'm bringing the game to Hawaii Social Media Club Workshop.  I got an email from Demetrio Maguidgad explaining how he remixed the game, how it worked!  I've shared details on the wiki here.   Now, I've remixed to give it some Hawaiian Aloha spirit.  The audience is both nonprofits and small businesses.

I'm going to remix this again .. so suggestions welcomed.

Comments

[Richard Reeve]

Your effort here brought me back to a course I took part in at Wesleyan called "teaching across cultures" that was totally taught using this methodology. the professor was a musician, and the exercises our groups delved into ranged from explorations of the I Ching to marching blindfolded in a group of fifty on the football field.

All I can say, this method works...look forward to you sharing the outcomes.

[Chris Heuer]

This is really exciting Beth - am looking forward to seeing you later this week in Hawaii and participating in this with you. Makes my session seem pretty lame, so I am going to have to rethink what I am doing a bit and try to improve it further.

[Kevin Martone]

Thanks for all the details on implementing the social media game. I am most likely going to do a simplified version of the game with the camps we work with at our conference in late November. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for everything you do,
Kevin