Marketeers are no fools
von Mark Howells-Mead
The first day of April has been long reserved for making fools of people, though the origins of the unusual tradition are lost in the mists of time. Each year, countless people are tricked and suckered into tales of surprise news, unexpected special deals and apparently life-changing decisions… only to find out later in the day that they have been the victims of a prank. In fact, the day’s tradition is so well established that pretty much everyone who remembers the date will be wary of news released on that day.
Yesterday’s examples were clever and by no means unusual, though many people were taken in by clever and strategic reports by such high-profile sources as UK newspaper The Guardian, who announced that it would no longer be issuing a print version but would be switching its news distribution entirely to the Twitter platform. Swiss Tourism joined in the day’s fun with a particularly clever, entertaining and professional online campaign to recruit volunteers to help floss Swiss mountains and clean bird droppings from cliff faces.
(Translated version shared at vimeo.com by user swissmiss. View the advertising campaign and the original version of the video in German on the Switzerland Tourism website.)
Media website SlideShare (where we share some of our own presentations) alternately annoyed and entertained users by temporarily adjusting the statistics of how many people were viewing their presentations, at the same time making a great case for viral marketing by getting their users to unwittingly post the great success of their presentations to Twitter, immediately creating a highly visible “trending topic” on the messaging website during the day yesterday. Not even Twitter was safe, as alternative service identi.ca switched the layout of their own website to that of their rival and announced that they had bought Twitter for “an undisclosed sum”. Internet monolith Google made their own annual 1st April announcement, this time for the Gmail Autopilot, a (sadly fake) automatic email response tool to help deal with increasing floods of emails. With a userbase of over 34 million, Facebook was always going to be a good place to start a viral April Fool campaign and according to their own figures, U.S. company FamilyLink.com – who operate the “We’re Related” application – temporarily increased their traffic fivefold by contacting 19 million of their users to try and convince them that they were a distant relation of U.S. president Barack Obama.
With the increase in online communication over the past few years and the fact that April Fool pranks can reach many more people through file sharing websites, marketeers can look to the examples of this year’s most popular tricks to help promote their business. By showing a relaxed approach and using a professionally created marketing idea to “join in the fun”, a company can gain itself attention not just in online communities but also in offline media. While many people take such tricks in their stride, particularly on 1st April, modern culture also dictates that companies must be wary of going too far. Not only must companies stay away from the dangerous ground of breaching levels of trust, they must also be highly aware that many users and potential customers may see their prank in a negative way, losing business instead of gaining it.
Geschrieben von Mark Howells-Mead am 3. April 2009 um 08:43 | Permalink
Tags (Schlagworte): 1st april, april fools, fool, marketing, online, viral marketing
Einen Kommentar hinterlassen