The Student Leader Blog

Campus Wide Game of Tag....With Zombies ( HvZ )

Campus life at Rochester Institute of Technology has never been so alive...well actually dead. The students are engaged in a campus wide game of modified tag called Zombie Tag that runs 24 hours a day nonstop.

USA Today picked up on the evolving game that's spreading like wildfire across the US.

The rules are fundamentally simple: Zombie tags human, human becomes a zombie. Unlike movie zombies, with shambling walks and undead makeup, zombies in the game just wear headbands to distinguish them from armband-wearing humans. And they are free to sprint.

Humans ward off zombies with Nerf guns or by hitting them with a balled-up sock — a defensive move that stuns the zombie, usually for 15 minutes. The goal is to still be a live human at the end.

There is even a website dedicated to the game as well as several YouTube clips that play like a late night edition of SportsCenter.

The idea of mixing small group activities related to just your interest group with whole campus events is great and collectively builds the culture on campus. Even if not everyone is participating as a human or zombie there is something about this "always on" type of engagement that builds excitement.

The Commotion, Calamity, Beautiful Cacophony of College Students' Bodies Clashing

Everything is leading up to my inevitable domination of all of Hunter College, situated nicely in the center of New York City's richest district, the cultural-yuppie-dwelling Upper East Side. Control the money here and you control the world. Today, I controlled a table. Well, half of a table.

Today was the Club Fair, hosted and organized by the Undergraduate Student Government. When I feel like my head is getting big thanks to the amount of power I exercise over student publications, I like to step back and watch the student government organize something as outrageous as entertaining as this triumphantly and trumping my style, and my ego deflates to a shriveled state, abandoned.

For those not in the know, I'm the chair of the Media Board, which handles all student publications. This year I decided to pack up, move out, and secure a table to promote and spread the word of the school's finest and most ambitious writers, artists, photographers, and hopefully forthcoming directors and musicians. Things like this fair offer exciting prospects. People pay attention to you. They wander of to you because they want to hear about who you are and what you do, not because to promised them free candy and cookies. Healthy protip for tables who did offer candy and cookies: when I walked around, I only stopped at your tables to eat the junk food you had laying around. I didn't listen to a word you said. Anyway!

The entire 69th Street between Lexington and Park was shut down, as it is every year. Our table was closer to the Park Avenue end, farthest away from the commotion of the rock wall and bouncy castle, which in itself was a shame because I kind of wanted to watch people ricochet in the inflatable joust and smell the cotton candy and popcorn machines more potent. I never really grew up. I ate ice cream for dinner tonight. No lie.

So this was the traffic jam during peak hours. At first, it was a rush to get this many people swarming and asking questions. In fact, it was nearly overwhelming at points, especially since we were representing about a dozen publications on a two man crew. Eventually, I just sat back and relaxed. I'm generally not used to talking loudly for long periods of time, so my throat became sore fairly quickly.

But boy did our sign-in list fill up quickly. It's two pages in the Media Board Bible, which I use to organize my to-do lists and store contact information. It's just a composition marble notebook I bought from CVS. It's littered with things like hearts and cute drawings and messages from secret admirers because I always leave it open in my office when I leave at the end of the day.

Our table was situated in between the Film & Media Department and the Hunter Fighting Game Club, which is the best damn club ever and it's a shame their Soul Calibur IV tournament is being held on a Saturday. Seriously, who wants to go to school on a Saturday, even if it is to play video games? But they were real sports even though we called them nerds under our breaths.

I, of course, enlisted the help of two great friends who are always in way better and calmer moods than myself. The distorted decorated arm on the left belongs to Sal, treasurer of the school's literary magazine the Olivetree Review and a glorious fountain of useful information; to his right, the amazing Jessica, artistically inclined and by far the cutest of our trio. We were also accompanied by assorted Media Board people such as fellow SL Blogger Steve Silvestri and queen bee herself, Tania, who arrived just in time to make a snarky comment about the fighting games club.

All in all, I deem our four hour literary scourge a great success. We moved a lot of magazines and raised a lot of interest, networked with a lot of people, and I managed to get a cute girl's e-mail address. Well, actually, I got her club's e-mail address. She also forgot my name pretty quickly, come to think of it.

Word of Mouth Marketing: free advertising and a heck of a pillow fight.

Word of mouth marketing is the least understood and most coveted promotional technique perhaps since the dawn of mankind. It's free, it's fast, it's powerful, but--alas--it is as mysterious to us as the nature of human consciousness and the evolution of the platypus.

According to the recent Word of Mouth Marketing Conference in NYC, the average person has about 11 intimate contacts, 150 social contacts, and 500 to 1,500 "weak ties." That's a lot of potential people your message could reach in less time than it takes you to say, "viral, viral, viral."

As student leaders, we should be trying to leverage the power of word of mouth, though I can't tell you how. The huge pillow fight last weekend (see above) was entirely word of mouth and apparently awesome. So for this post, I'm just going to use the pillow fight as a case study and thought experiment to try to figure out what it takes for a message to travel and stick.

Pillow Talk (hehe):
My thinking is that news of the fight spread like goose feathers on a windy day because:
a. It's weird. People are likely to look up and pay attention because it's not an everyday phenomenon.
b. It's a little mysterious. What will happen? Who will come? What kind of pillow should I bring?
c. It gives people something fun to do together.
d. It's inclusive (pretty much anyone can enjoy it and be a useful contributor).
e. And lastly, people are scared to go alone because they don't want to look stupid. So they enlist as many acquaintances as possible in case no one else shows up.

Again, this is not my field of expertise (or even experience), but I'm pretty darn sure that creating a viral messages requires a certain degree of risk taking and outside the box thinking. First and foremost, that's what gets people's attention and fills the streets with feathers. If anyone has other ideas, I'm very much up for hearing them (and, hey, maybe even spreading them out).