About a year ago, I decided that I would do the unthinkable – I would buy myself a pretty expensive…toy. Yes, I bought myself a Wii. The main reason, truthfully, that I wanted a Wii is that I had heard of Wii Fit and EA Sports Active. I hate going to gyms, and while I love doing Yoga, it isn’t cardio enough. So essentially, I bought my Wii instead of a treadmill or something like that.
There’s one thing you learn about the Wii eventually. The sensors mainly care about the position of your controller or your nunchuk. This is particularly evident when you are doing arm exercises. If you point your controller up like you’re supposed to, the game will count it as a shoulder press, whether or not you have a resistance band wrapped around your fingers.
If you wanted to, you could probably figure out a way to do the whole work-out without doing anything except moving the controllers the way the game expects you to. The game would pay you accolades. You would be told that you had accomplished your goals. You just wouldn’t have really accomplished anything meaningful.
In Social Media, the same logic holds true. There are certain things that you can do that will get you attention or more followers or whatever you are striving for. If you attack an influential person, for example, you are likely to get his or her attention and lots and lots of blog traffic. If you auto-follow everyone who follows you, you will likely grow your own follower numbers pretty quickly. If you promote yourself 24/7, you will likely gain a high quality reputation.
People expect you to do certain things in this game, and if you appear to be doing those things, you will be told that you have accomplished your goals.
Have you really worked out, though, if you don’t hold the resistance band in your hands while you stretch? Are you really accomplishing Social Media greatness if all you do is play the game and go through the motions?
I like to do the actual exercises. Sometimes I don’t hold the controllers quite right because I am concentrating on the actual exercise, not just what the sensors will pick up. Sometimes I work up a sweat and I get kind of sore. I like it that way.
How about you?
Margie, I like your Wii analogy.
Those of us who’ve participated in #UsGuys have discussed Klout recently. It’s one way to measure activity and influence on Twitter, but not the only way. You could count followers, tweets, or something even more esoteric.
You could play Wii like a “traditional” video game, where the object is to get the highest score. In many games that’s a good way to measure success. But if you’re using the Wii to exercise, the score on the screen doesn’t matter as much as, say, whether you’ve lost a few pounds or taken a couple of inches off your waistline. (When you go out, will people see your Wii score or your trim physique?)
In almost any aspect of life, we “game” the score a little (hopefully not to the point of breaking rules, just bending a bit) to meet our own goals. Wii and social media are both tools. How you measure their usefulness depends in large part on what you’re using them for.
Excellent point – Wii can be exercise, but it can also be “just” game. So much depends on what you want to get out of it. Maybe you play the game just for fun, or maybe you play it because as you say, you want to get the highest score.
Thank you for enriching my point. I always love when that happens 😀
Nice fun story telling post. Well played!
Thanks…nice pun! 🙂