The CEO Game

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez hired 200 people to tweet for him.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez must believe it’s about time he spreaded his influence over the web. Otherwise he would not have hired 200 people to manage his Twitter account. That’s right, two hundred. The man who only several months ago claimed that Twitter users are terrorists, is now one himself and by the looks of it he is taking the social network by a storm.

Now On Twitter

According to the BBC and additional sources, Chavez whose popularity is rising fast, has over a quarter of a million followers already, just could not handle the constant stream of messages, or tweets if you prefer, he was receiving and had to turn to help from the “pros”- a team of professional correspondants who specialize in public relations.

However, while many celebrities, politicians and other public personas on Twitter have a bunch of people tweeting and posting stuff on their behalf as well as basically managing their accounts, 200 people doing these actions has to be one of the largest and most impressive dedicated teams (recorded that is). Perhaps even bigger than Barack Obama’s team or the Dalai Lama’s.

So why the need for such an immerse team? Well, Presidente’ says that he has received over 50,000 messages since he’s created his account two weeks ago. At this rate, it is clear he can’t answer all of them alone and still have the time to be president. But setting up a Twitter account in order to spread his message doesn’t come as a surprise- Chavez has already daily speeches broadcast on all stations in Bolivia, but guess that was not enough.

While It’s not hard to criticize Chavez who is basing his dictatorship slowly but surely, it took him only a short while to realize the power of Twitter and now he using it in full throttle- connecting with the people and spreading his influence. In spite of the fact that only 30 percent of Bolivians have an access to the web, it looks like many of them enjoy the opportunity to have the leader within reach (even if it isn’t him after all). Chavez claims only a low percent of the messages so far were critical, but he handled them swiftly. Guess that is just one more Twitter account Obama is going to stay clear of.

Omer Shachnai

The CEO Game.

eRepublik is an online multi-player simulation game and a social network that was developed by eRepublik labs and was launched in October 2008. The idea behind the game was to create a virtual world, which is based on the real world, in which every participant can take part in determining his country’s future. Players, who are referred to as citizens,  can determine financial policies, affect local and national politics, create and join political parties, build their own businesses and even wage war on other countries. eRepublik uses the combination of a social networking platform and a strategy game to create a virtual realm of what might our world look like if things had gone different.

eRepublik – Managing the New World

eRepublik is built out of three main modules:

• Economic Module – eRepublik simulates a virtual economy in which every player can simulate his own business. The economy is affected by the local financial relations between the companies and by the global economy. eRepublik also allows each country to determine its local financial policies and use them to affect the global economy.
• Political Module –In eRepublik , once a certain citizen achieves the required amount of experience, the citizen can take part in his own country’s politics. Each country has its own parties, congress and president and each year eRepublik holds an election for all of those positions.
• War Module – The President of each country can decide, after the approval of his congress, to wage war over other countries. War is an important influence on the financial growth of every country.

Since its release at 2008, eRepublik has won a few awards including “The Future of Web Apps“ Award and has raised over 2.5 million Euros. In the CEO Game we use similar baselines to those used in eRepublik. We believe that integrating real-world data into a business simulation can create a simulation that is more relevant than ever and will assist in learning how the local and global financial markets work.

Ailon.

The CEO Game.