What’s coming to the Simulator in 2020?
Ten years on from our first simulations, we’re working on a bigger scale, for world-class organisations and more diverse teams than ever.
So to stay at the cutting edge, we have two challenges:
- Make our roleplay reflect the richness and global diversity of social – more video, more stories, more complex humour and misinformation
- Make the setup of our exercises simpler, smoother, and quicker so we keep building a reputation for having great ideas, not just cool software
Here’s some of the improvements we’ll be bringing to our exercises in Q1 this year:
Richer roleplay
- Simulating the scale of reaction to a post on Twupdates, with simulated counts of likes and retweets, which roleplayers can update during the exercise as a post gains traction by editing published tweets
- Integrated GIF reactions with access to the GIPHY library to add to posts on Twupdates or Friendbook
- Greater use of video, with easier upload and playback of video by participants and roleplayers, to Twupdates or Instantgram – simulating video posts, or simple Stories
- More sophisticated Autopilot: our auto-tweeting functionality now handles up to five parallel streams of tweets on different topics and from different categories of Twupdates characters, simulating the mix of business-as-usual, customer and wider general public reaction to an incident, and how that changes over the course of a crisis
- Smoother preparation of exercises, with pre-drafted tweets
- Social intranet/Team chat module simulating Yammer, Teams or Slack, which participants can use to post, share files or comment on roleplayed posts
More flexibility in configuration
- Faster, more flexible setup: streamlining our interfaces for managing character profiles, users and configuration so it’s easier to make changes during an exercise if needed
- “Newsflash” messages shown to users on any dashboard on the platform, for exercise alerts
- Management of multiple social profiles, with the ability for participants to switch easily between corporate and customer profiles, or between group and country accounts for Twupdates or Instantgram
