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Let an April Fool's Day Prank Help Your Business--Without the Joke Being on You
April 1, 2008

You know what today is, and by the time you read this, you may very well have fallen for an April Fool’s prank or two. (Significant others and/or children are good for this.) The top news portal for the printing industry, WhatTheyThink, today published its annual “WhatThey Don’t Think” issue of gag stories, including:

• The Ultimate in Green Printing: Xerox Enables Customers to Grow Their Own Toner
• Forecast: By 2012, Printing Industry Consultants to Outnumber Commercial Printing Establishments
• Google, China and Sovereign Fund of Dubai Acquire Entire U.S. Printing Industry for $90 Billion
• Printers Add Ancillary Services of Laundry, Furniture Repair, and Other Profitable Tasks

Google gets in on the act and this year “announced” their Gmail Custom Time, which is said to enable Gmail users to send e-mail back in time so they are always received on time. (Last year, Google “announced” Google TiSP, a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users’ plumbing systems.)

Other news sites and publications also typically run Onion-style stories on April 1, and some even get picked up by other media organizations or forums and relayed as real news, such as this “story” about Research In Motion’s next BlackBerry running Windows Mobile Platform. (Remember also that an Onion story was once picked up by the most popular newspaper in China—the Beijing Evening News—and reported as if Congress really was going to leave Washington D.C. unless the city built them a new Capitol with a retractable dome.)

Not everyone gets into the “holiday” spirit, of course, but there are advantages to playing along. Brands across the economic spectrum often do something for April Fool’s Day, and while the majority of them are taken in the spirit of lighthearted fun, some rankle some feathers, and some have a downright deleterious effect on the brand. (ChiefMarketer.com has a run down of some hits and misses, as does the Museum of Hoaxes and April Fool’s Day on the Web.)

While it’s likely too late for you to devise a new “April Fool’s Day strategy” for this year, but here are some tips to keep in mind for next year:

• Avoid being malicious, especially toward your competition—It probably goes without saying that if you have “news” headlines that include personal attacks on people or other companies you’re setting yourself up for trouble. The key to a successful prank is “lighthearted fun,” and keep in mind the Hippocratic Oath: “first, do no harm.” Good taste should rule; one radio hoax backfired when listeners were told that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had been killed in a car accident. Bad idea.
• In a related tip, sending faux e-mails claiming to be from someone else is also a bad idea—and illegal.
• Keep it clean—Try not to be crass, scatological, or sexually explicit, and watch your language. You’re trying to appeal to a broad audience and people can be very easily offended.
• Avoid politics, which these days is the third rail of discussion topics. Or, if you do, the best strategy is non-partisan—that is, hit both sides.
• Oh, and religion should be verboten.

Sure, most of these of these tips should be obvious, but sometimes people get carried away. As they say, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” The best pranks are those that seem easy-to-believe on the surface, a few seconds of thought will easily point out the illogic. Again, they key is “light-hearted fun.”

A good, well-executed April Fool’s Day prank can be good PR for your company, and in this age of viral marketing, a good joke can and will be passed around the Internet. And keeping the aforementioned caveats in mind will go a long way toward ensuring that your prank won’t backfire—and place the joke firmly on you and your company.

Posted by Richard Romano on April 1, 2008 | Comments (0)