Helping people catch the Science Museum Lates Bug
To promote the Science Museum’s Bio Terrorism-themed Lates event, we invented an infectious social media-based game — #SMLates Bug. As we intended, word about the event soon spread around Facebook and Twitter like a much nicer kind of virus…
Every month, the Science Museum’s ‘Lates’ event entertains the capital’s adults with a grown-up science party — and November 2010 was no different. A theme of Bio Terrorism gave us the opportunity to create an innovative online mechanic — raising awareness, increasing attendance, and growing the Lates email database.
And so our social media game, #SMLates Bug, was born. Users were asked to ‘infect’ their friends with a unique URL on Facebook and Twitter to spread the ‘bug’ — and the message of Science Museum Lates. We even geographically tracked the results to see just how infectious the social footprint was.
The game spread like, well, a virus. The bug infected more people than we could have imagined — and interest in Science Museum Lates soared.
Overall visits to the Lates event page were up 348% on the year average during our activity period — proving that not all viruses are bad…