It happens every year – and every year I am taken in by one of these pranks. I’m talking about April Fools’ Day gags.
If you think about it, April Fools’ jokes are an absolutely fantastic way of getting some free viral marketing! Come up with an elaborate hoax and send it to all your friends. If it’s believable, then it just might find its way around the globe, providing your business with some great free publicity in the process.
There were a couple of highly-publicised pranks on 1 April this year from serial ‘foolers’ Google and Virgin. Google’s gBall prank even had News Corporation bluffed – the latter published an article about the gBall on the News.com.au website, unaware that the gBall was a joke.
The gBall is supposedly a joint Google and Australian Football League project whereby a satellite tracking device is installed in an Australian Rules football, so that the trajectory of the ball can be tracked. As you can see in the graphic, you simply plug your ball into your computer to download the data! The gBall also vibrates if a talent scout wants to speak to you and if your ball goes missing, you can simply locate it with Google Maps – gold! Even better, the gBall website proudly proclaims that all gBalls are made to comply with Australian Standard AS-0104-2009 (Use of electronic Geo-navigational satellite instrumentation in leather goods). Double gold!
I wasn’t tricked by the gBall hoax, but I was fooled (momentarily) by a fellow blogger, Geoff Jennings, who announced that he was giving up his position as a online jobs board ‘watchdog’ because he had accepted the CEO job at one of the job boards that he routinely criticises (CareerOne.com.au). I should twigged when Rupert Murdoch (owner of CareerOne.com.au) was quoted in the blog post he sent out. As I reached the bottom of the blog post, it became apparent that he was pulling our collective legs, but he certainly had me going for a moment…
The point of the story – April Fools’ jokes attract attention and if you can engineer a good one, then you can get yourself a whole lot of free advertising.
