For MidAmeriCon II I was a deputy division head for Marketing.  We were always trying to come up with new ideas for social media and getting people to take pictures at conventions to help promote the convention.  Happy people who were interested in our convention and look here is a fun way to show you are supporting MidAmeriCon II!  Hence the DIY Selfie Kit was born.

The idea was simple.  Make your own props for pictures you take around Kansas City.  Each kit had two sheets of props to cut out, popsicle sticks and the table was supposed to have a set of scissors and tape.

DIY Selfie Kit: The PDF of the final art.

Good idea in principle… wrong execution.  The table sitters didn’t understand the idea behind it.  So as a marketer I didn’t explain the purpose to my audience-  the people who were promoting the convention at the fan tables.

Now I have worked on conventions that could have made this successful.  But it really depends on the audience and the person who is promoting the convention.  I see this working for a convention with a younger audience because of their interactions with social media.  People who want to take selfies and are really enthusiastic about the convention.

To make this:  I used something like this icon set.  I resized them to make them large enough for a person’s face and added trim lines around the images to show where to cut them out and to make it very obvious what these were for.  The visual lines are quickly recognizable rather than having to read the text, because as we have seen people really don’t read the text all that often.

They were then put in bags with the popsicle sticks because unlike me, I figured most people don’t have popsicle sticks laying around but are more likely to have glue or tape they can use.