Have you ever received emails about April Fools’ Day jokes or pranks? Have you ever sent out prank emails or website links to your friends? If yes, then that’s the sign of April Fools’ Day viral marketing. As a marketer, we tend to use any marketing channel and occasion to engage our customers or prospects. Then why not April Fools’ Day?

If you deploy the strategy correctly, an April Fools’ Day campaign can inject humour elements into your brand, provide a welcome break, and may reach the audience that you’d never think about. An April Fools’ Day campaign through online channels could help you to achieve results at almost no cost. You can use any online marketing channel to construct your campaign such as websites, emails, widgets & gadgets, blogs and social media sites. Of course, you need to be very careful about it and you don’t want to harm your brand. Don’t even try it if it doesn’t fit your brand image at all. For example, if you’re a legal firm or government agency, you may not want to try.

Google is pretty good at April Fools’ Day pranks. Last year, it announced two faux products on April Fools’ Day – Gmail Paper (Google will print thousands of your emails as hard copy and deliver to you for free. Of course, there will be ads on the back) and Google TiSP (a plumbing-based in-home wireless broadband service). You can come out with any ideas for your own campaign. The only thing that limits you is your imagination. PC World has summarized the top April Fools’ Day Jokes of the past few years. It may be a good starting point for generating your own ideas. Let’s take a look at the top 5 (source: PCWorld.com).

Top 5 April Fools’ Day Joke Web Sites

1. Camouflage Deer? – On 1st April 2007, the PETA Files blog announced a new plan to protect local deer from hunters by painting them with a camouflage pattern.
2. Opera SoundWave – On 1st April 2005, Opera announced platform-independent real-time speech technology for short and medium range interpersonal communication. It may be a way to outdo Firefox and IE :-)
3. The Risks Digest – On 1st April 2006, it reported about a motorist trapped in a traffic circle for 14 hours because of his car’s malfunctioning lane-keeping software.
4. The Screened Sphorb – ThinkGeek announced a product called The Screened Sphorb that uses resolution transistors to create an array of functional sub-screens for just $39.99.
5. Animated Tattoos – Want to try? On 1st April 2006, howstuffworks.com told you how animated tattoos work.

Again, why do an April Fools’ Day campaign? Apart from possible branding benefits I mentioned earlier, it may help you generate inbound links to your website to boost PageRank and website traffic. Furthermore, people do pass it around and talk about it (like what I just did) for years, if you do it right!

Happy April Fools’ Day!