By now we're probably heard of at least one creative way that businesses are using Twitter to help improve their awesome quotient. So when I read that Infinity Ward (makers of Call of Duty Modern Warfare) were using Twitter to solicit suggestions for the next installment of the Call of Duty series, I found myself at about a 2/ 10 on the "this might be interesting" scale. But because I've been hard wired to click on anything that combines video games with social networking, I gave it a quick look. And I was quite pleasantly surprised.
You might have seen Twitter being used for business before, but what you (and by you I mean me) probably havent seen is Twitter being used quite like this.
Heres the scoop. Basically Infinity Ward asked a question on their site - "Name one thing you'd like to see in Modern Warfare 2". The reply button then kicks the user to Twitter and pre-fills their response with the #MW2 Hashtag. All of responses are then aggregated back on Infinity Ward's site. Interesting sure - but we're still meat and potatoes. We need a little flava flav!
And that "flav" comes in the form of delicious social ratings chedda'. Check out the bottom right of each tweet. Now we're getting somewhere.
The leaderboard button you can see in the screen shot then tallies the individual twitter users whose suggestions have earned the most votes, and shows each of the posts they've submitted with the MW2 Hashtag.
Personally I feel as thought the leaderboard would be more effective if it ranked the suggestions based on votes, instead of the people who made those suggestions (under the system, the single best suggestion might not make the list if one person made several lesser suggestions). I'm also not sure if the dismissiveness associated with Twitter makes it the best tool for social rating. People to to hit and fade when it comes to Twitter, and don't usually take the time to sort through pages of old data. I.e. really good ideas could easily be overlooked by the masses if they happened to be posted at a really slow (or really popular) time.
But what I do love is how community outreach in this fashion really has an opportunity to create bonds between previously unlinked Call of Duty enthusiasts and between the player-base and the development team.
What Infinity Ward has done is also very reminiscent of Harvard's Live Question Tool - something we've casually adopted here at Penn State, and have been hoping to port over to our Movable Type platform. Does the casual, highly mobile, condense nature of a tool like Twitter make participation and social rating even more useful? Or will things get jumbled a bit too quickly? Only time will tell, but I'll be following Infinity Ward's progress with this little experiment with great interest.
Games, twitter, social ratings, business - its a little bit of everything. Gotta love that.
Read more on the story @ computerandvideogames.com
You might have seen Twitter being used for business before, but what you (and by you I mean me) probably havent seen is Twitter being used quite like this.
Heres the scoop. Basically Infinity Ward asked a question on their site - "Name one thing you'd like to see in Modern Warfare 2". The reply button then kicks the user to Twitter and pre-fills their response with the #MW2 Hashtag. All of responses are then aggregated back on Infinity Ward's site. Interesting sure - but we're still meat and potatoes. We need a little flava flav!And that "flav" comes in the form of delicious social ratings chedda'. Check out the bottom right of each tweet. Now we're getting somewhere.
The leaderboard button you can see in the screen shot then tallies the individual twitter users whose suggestions have earned the most votes, and shows each of the posts they've submitted with the MW2 Hashtag.
Personally I feel as thought the leaderboard would be more effective if it ranked the suggestions based on votes, instead of the people who made those suggestions (under the system, the single best suggestion might not make the list if one person made several lesser suggestions). I'm also not sure if the dismissiveness associated with Twitter makes it the best tool for social rating. People to to hit and fade when it comes to Twitter, and don't usually take the time to sort through pages of old data. I.e. really good ideas could easily be overlooked by the masses if they happened to be posted at a really slow (or really popular) time.But what I do love is how community outreach in this fashion really has an opportunity to create bonds between previously unlinked Call of Duty enthusiasts and between the player-base and the development team.
What Infinity Ward has done is also very reminiscent of Harvard's Live Question Tool - something we've casually adopted here at Penn State, and have been hoping to port over to our Movable Type platform. Does the casual, highly mobile, condense nature of a tool like Twitter make participation and social rating even more useful? Or will things get jumbled a bit too quickly? Only time will tell, but I'll be following Infinity Ward's progress with this little experiment with great interest.
Games, twitter, social ratings, business - its a little bit of everything. Gotta love that.
Read more on the story @ computerandvideogames.com
Leave a comment