Events and Social Media

Accept the challenges so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.
- Gen. George Patton

I just read an article in Corporate Event magazine about an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that was played at the CEMA conference in 2006 (unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an online version of this article). Funny thing is that I was at that conference and I participated in the ARG, but I only made it a little way down the path. The parts that I made it through were way cool, though, and showcase how my buddy jmacofearth keeps referring to events as "the ultimate social media."

Basically, CEMA used nTag electronic name tags and planted a mole among the attendees who, when "zapped" as a connection, tagged the attendee as having moved to the next level of the game. The next morning, those tagged attendees received a token under their hotel room door for a free coffee in the hotel coffee shop. When redeemed, those attendees were given coffee wraps around the cups that congratulated them and gave them a URL to move to the next level. Attendees could use the AOL cybercafe to go to the URL and answer a few short questions like their favorite vacation spot (beach, snow), favorite flavor (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry), and a couple of others. Certain partipants were chosen to go even further and were given new clues, and eventually one was deemed the winner and given a set of luxury luggage on the last day of the conference.

It was a social media and live interaction scavenger hunt that got the whole conference buzzing. I love this idea and I hope more conferences come up with really cool new ways for sponsors to participate in fresh marketing opportunities like this!