April Fools and PR

April Fools is a day where businesses attempt to show their sense of humor with the world and get some extra retweets for the day. Some of the April fools jokes worked well and others simply missed the mark. An article by PR News shows some examples of what companies did that worked, didn't work, and just plain missed the spot. One of the things the companies did which worked well was not making outlandish claims. The companies who had good April fools jokes created press releases in the same format as a normal press release with a claim which seemed strange but once the full article was read the joke was understood.

Some companies were a bit to obvious with their April fools jokes. Obvious jokes are often times not very funny and show a lack of effort. The PR News article uses a solar power plant claiming to be switching to coal power as and example of one of the bad April fools jokes. The joke is obvious, a solar company would not be switching to coal power. The joke is also betraying the values of the company and its followers, the people who are going to see the tweet are not going to think it is very funny.

The worst April fools PR were from companies who essentially created fake news stories. The stories were not necessarily a play on the way they normally do things with a harmless accusation. Stories claiming that your business is going to be closing are not going to be good PR. To me it seems like common sense not to tell your customer base you are closing, if they think you are closing they are not going to keep looking to buy your product, they will start looking elsewhere. The current cultural climate dealing with fake news does not make these April fools jokes any better. The jokes undermine the fact of news being accurate even if it is only an April fools joke.

The Washington Post created an article listing a bunch of the April fools jokes sent out on social media by different companies. Here are some of my favorites:

• Amazon Publishing delivering actual authors
• Google Maps being a game of Where's Waldo
• eHarmony getting into dog matching
• Stephen King running for the Governor of Maine

Although these are not actual events occurring I enjoyed the creativity and playfulness of them.