Today I had the good fortune to take part in the very first Twitterment Golf Tourney at the Galt Golf and Country Club in Cambridge as part of the Lone Wolf team. The premise was to be the first social media powered golf tournament, getting people to engage and have a great time out on the links using their iPhones, Blackberrys or Android phones(though in typical Waterloo Region fashion I can’t say I saw any of those).
The event featured the use of a new app called GooseChase, a scavenger hunt based app that was used to bring interactivity to each hole. Basically every hole would have some task or goal that you had to take a picture of, then it would be saved to the app and you would get awarded points. I took a shot white standing in buckets full of smooshed grapes, totally exploded a cupcake(see right), smashed a present pinata full of candy and took a dip in the pond all for points in the GooseChase app. In the end my team got 17000 points and finished in a 3 way tie for first. It was a lot of fun to play with, though I found it also had a lot of flaws when it came to picture management and social media integration. I’m planning on writing an email to them tomorrow with all my user feedback.
There were prizes for all sorts of different stuff, so instead the usual closest to the pin or longest drive, they had the best team outfits or best Happy Gilmore shot. Here’s my Happy shot, didn’t win but I did totally crush the ball. There were also prizes for most active tweeter and many more, so it was an interesting array of prizes.
The networking aspect of the event was awesome, got to meet all sorts of new people and some people I hadn’t seen in ages that I had no idea would be there. My Wolfpack teammates kept asking me if I knew everyone, as I seemingly kept bumping into friends and acquaintances all over the course. What can I say? I guess I get around.
The food at the post-round dinner was absolutely fantastic. I believe it was catered by the Bauer Kitchen in Waterloo The GGCC catered and everything I ate was pretty out of this world. Mini slider burgers, gourmet toppings, pulled pork and tonnes more were just fabulous. The Bauer Kitchen catered the poutine table at the event. It makes me want to take a trip out of my way to the Bauer Kitchen now, as it’s long been a place I’ve been meaning to check out.
I found overall the event was great and I had a really good time. There were some things that seemed to work better than others. I tried to tweet as much as possible, but I found I kinda had to choose between tweeting or using the GooseChase app. The scavenger hunt ended up being my primary focus, so I couldn’t possibly do both and keep up playing a round of golf and driving a cart. Also I found there was definitely a discrepancy between those who did the social media stuff and “true” golfers. The experienced golfers cleaned up on the best score and fastest round, but that was also a bi-product of the fact they weren’t actually doing any of the social media stuff. I know social media is not everyone’s bag, but it was kinda the point of the whole event to participate above and beyond the golf aspects.
My golf game was positively awful today, so I was lucky it was best ball as I wasn’t faring so well out there. Seems the only thing I could hit was those Happy Gilmore shots. I had a great time and it was definitely something awesome to take part in. This was a very cool event organized by a bunch of great folks from around Waterloo Region. Kitchener and Waterloo often play host to these new style, social media events, so it was great that Cambridge could be host to creative such an interesting and fun event.
