Monday, November 5, 2012

4 Tips for Surviving A Zombie Apocalypse Using Social Media

Fact: A zombie’s main advantage is perseverance. And strength in numbers. If you get outnumbered by zombies, fear not, faithful. All it takes is a bit of awareness, a faster-than-average gait and a smartphone to survive a zombie attack.

To help you better prepare for an invasion by clumsy brain eaters, here are 4 tips we’ve compiled on how to outwit the witless:

1. Zombies can’t run. So keep those sneakers on, grab your phone and get moving.

Granted, this is not a social media tip, just good common sense. The reanimated remains of some zombies will move faster than others, depending on the extent of decay of their limbs. But none have the fast muscle twitch that allows us still-living mortals to get up and go. Stay a few steps ahead of the undead, and you ought to be safe. If you’re especially fit and energetic, running in a serpentine pattern will confuse and confound the undead, so if you only have one zombie to avoid. So grab your smartphone (with the HootSuite app, of course), take a few quick steps and that should take you out of harm’s way. Just remember to keep moving.

2. Ditch the CB radio and get on Twitter, fool!

The apocalypse will not take place in a vacuum. The living dead can’t down wireless towers or power lines. So why do zombie flicks insist that CB radio will be the only working technology in the event of a zombie invasion? During our fact-checking, one of our engineers pointed out that areas served by nuclear power will lose electricity eventually. When the undead reach the power plants’ command terminals, and begin to munch on the brains of the folks at the controls, only areas served by hydro electricity will remain “on the grid.” But that should give the living enough time to organize using social tools.

HootSuite Tip: Set up streams in HootSuite to follow all zombie invasion-related hashtags, and check the geo-tags on recent posts and images uploaded by the living. These will help you identify what areas to avoid, and what areas are more densely populated by human zombie killers with smartphones.

3. Organize a Meetup.

Zombies respond only to loud noises and the sweet smell of brains (or so we believe). They will NOT be responding to a Meetup or Facebook event invite, so this is an easy way to get numbers on your side, and enlist a few zombie-slayers to your cause.

Use your laptop or smartphone to stay online, then focus on rallying the remaining living using networks like Facebook and Twitter. While you’re busy with outreach, remember to enlist and stay close to someone with the stomach to behead an animated corpse, ya dig?

4. If all else fails, go Thriller.

This is the one zombie factoid that is most often overlooked. Zombies cannot help but dance when Michael Jackson’s Thriller is playing. If you’re outnumbered by cannibalistic corpses with no escape, simply cue up Michael Jackson’s Thriller on YouTube, and do your best to recreate the famous dance from the beloved 1982 chart topper. Soon, no matter your dance skills, you’ll have all of their rotten limbs in step with your own. They can’t resist!

Need a refresher? Here’s the full version, so you can practice your cadaver choreography.