Twitter hunting!

 So it's Monday...and I'm very tired after a very long weekend.  Why - You might ask are you so tired?  Well I spent most of the weekend Twitter hunting around the Isle of Arran!  For those of you who haven't heard of this idea - it's basically a treasure or scavenger hunt which is run through the social networking/micro blogging site Twitter.

I work very closely with the Glasgow based support team here at Blackbaud (we're based in the same office so they can't get away from me) and they kindly asked me to help out on their quarterly away day.  These days are great team building and training exercises where Blackbaud takes them away at the weekend and gets them up to all sorts of high jinks!

So I don't pertain to being an expert on Twitter hunting but I thought I'd share the experiences we had on the day. 

We separated the team into 3 groups who each had a Twitter account to use throughout the day.  I was in a fourth group who were setting the clues and bonus items.

In preparation for the day I set up all of the accounts on Twitter and made sure they were all working with Twitpic also.  You don't need to register a separate account for twitpic as it uses your twitter credentials (which saves time).  Twitpic was used as most of our hunt items involved getting a picture of someone at a certain location on the Island.

We all met up in Glasgow early on Saturday morning where we had to get a train to Ardrossan then a ferry over to Brodick on Arran. The ferry took a little detour as a memorial to HMS Dasher which was sunk on that day in 1943 (more details here).  After a short ceremony we were back on our way to Arran.  On the ferry we handed out instructions and got the teams to register their mobile phones with twitter for use during the day.  All teams were equipped with a Laptop, an OS Map, 3G card, Mobile Phones, Twitter instructions and had a car hired from the Islands car hire place (don't talk to me about the Vauxhall Agila I ended up with which was not built for Island driving - But did do a great impression of a car flying at points in the day).  They were then sent on their way.  Once underway we started to Direct message the teams with their first clues (we decided to send the different teams to different start points and build it from there) and the teams got underway.

For the event itself we set up a Hashtag of (#Arran).  Hashtags are used in Twitter to represent an event and are great for keeping data together and for following lots of feeds on one subject at once.  So every time a team wanted to post something up on Twitter we insisted on them inserting this Hashtag into their message so everyone could track everything else that was happening on the day.  Importantly though hashtags are not really a feature of Twitter but more a convention used on twitter by users so we used Tweetdeck throughout the day to track these tags.

After the teams had completed their first tasks and sent in their pictures then we sent them another clue which involved them going to another part of the Island.  We used a points system to score the day as we wanted to intersperse the day with small bonus items like pictures of seals or some of the sites of Arran like Lochranza Castle.  We awarded 100 points for each clue that was completed and then 10 points for any bonus items.  The day was a roaring success with all the teams embracing the technology and enjoying themselves traveling around the island and learning loads about the local area.  The banter on Twitter was also very good and interesting to see how some of the teams interpreted the clues and bonuses (I always thought that Sand Castles had sand! ;-)).

The biggest lesson from the day were that we should have checked more into having a mobile phone signal (although actually that did make the day more interesting) and make it very clear to teams who haven't used the technology how things like replies and direct messages work.  Other than that it was an excellent team building exercise that I'd recommend to anyone and I could see it easily being reinterpreted as a fundraising challenge event tool.

Why not follow me on Twitter also?  Click here..although I have to be careful as you never know who is watching!