April Fool's Day Takes the Internet by a LOL Storm

April 1st, though more widely known as April Fool's Day, is a time when kids call parents to tell them they've gotten into an accident and totaled their cars or that their favorite celebrity died and now the concert they were looking forward to this summer had ultimately be canceled. April Fool's pranks can range from the trivial and last minute, to the intricately thought out and well-planned in advanced. This seems to be especially true for various websites and companies like Google, who changed the font one viewed the search engine in based on the font searched; Hulu and YouTube changed their sites to transport viewers back to 1996 and 1911, respectively; there was the introduction of Gmail Motion which unfortunately isn't as legit as it looks and the last notable April Fool's Day joke was Funny or Die's transformation into "Friday or Die" which featured nothing but videos of Rebecca Black in various parodies of her infamous song and music video.

I think this is one of the most ingenious things that a company could do, even if they aren't the only ones getting involved with the spirit of the day. It also falls into the idea of "unmarketing" that's talked about throughout Engage and once again, touching on how vital and successful viral marketing can be, as was discussed in Groundswell and New Rules for PR and Marketing. This was definitely a great way for the participating companies and organizations to get their creative juices flowing and try to make themselves stand out among the rest. They did this whether intentionally or unintentionally by creating a prank for the day that would have people around the Internet talking about it and telling other people, linking them to check it out for themselves. I know I'm one of those people, who linked the Gmail Motion joke to my Twitter for my friends to see as well. Even if  someone isn't necessarily talking and telling others about it, they're still at least thinking of what the company did and in turn, are also thinking about the company itself. Likewise, it isn't necessarily a viral campaign that the books discuss, but for that one day site traffic could have easily increased just because people were talking about what the sites did for pranks and essentially centered an Internet conversation about it, whether it was "Friday or Die" or the "new" Gmail Motion. So for that single day, each company that took part in April Fool's Day ultimately had a temporary viral campaign to bring awareness for their brands.