How fluent are you in emoji? On July 17, you just may have the opportunity to find out. For those of you who are truly bilingual (in English and emoji, that is), you’ll be able to show off your skills as GE launches the first #EmojiScience Decoding Challenge on Facebook Messenger. This Sunday, the mega conglomerate will unveil a Messenger bot named Dot, who will challenge emoji connoisseurs everywhere to decode science terms and phrases expressed in emoji.
July 17, which is the date expressed on emoji calendars, has become quite the social media day for a number of companies. Last year, the #WorldEmojiDay hashtag was trending by 9 a.m. ET, and managed to collect 93,000 tweets just three hours later. And as companies continue to discover the importance of social media in reaching their customers, these seemingly unimportant Twitter holidays have become all the rage.
In 2015, GE posed an emoji-based question to its followers on Twitter, which quickly became the most replied-to tweet in the company’s history. So this year, in hopes of capitalizing on the trend, GE is creating even more emoji codes, this time through a chatbot game via Messenger.
Players will converse with Dot the Bot, who will provide the first emoji code. From there, you can decide whether you’d like to answer, ask for a hint, or skip the question altogether. In total, the Facebook Messenger game contains 30 emoji codes, each of which will be scored based on correct answers, number of hints used, and skips. If you’re one of the high scorers, you’ll be dubbed an “Emoji Genius,” and will be eligible to win what GE calls an “summer emoji swag bag, filled with emoji beach balls, tote bags, sunglasses, stickers, emoji keyboards and a limited number of Emoji Science lab coats.”
And if you’re the best of the bunch, you’ll be rewarded with a trip to EmojiCon in San Francisco this fall.
So if you didn’t have plans for this weekend before, you most certainly do now.
