The following is the story of how hotelicopter punk’d the Internet for fame and profit.
I’ve just returned from the EyeforTravel Marketing Conference in Miami, where I presented The Anatomy of a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign (the story behind our new brand launch) to many of the leading marketers in our industry. I was pleased to see that the new brand for our hotel search engine, launched a month earlier for only $3,000, had about 70% brand recognition within the audience.
In case you missed it, we launched a viral marketing campaign on March 27th based on a fictional flying hotel. You can still view the April Fool’s Day web site here and the video here.
As many of you already know, we decided to change our name and our brand because VibeAgent (our previous name) did not accurately represent our new positioning as a hotel search engine. We were looking for a new brand that a) related to hotels; b) was fun and social; c) was memorable; and d) provided us some SEO lift for the word “hotel”.
So after much brainstorming, we decided on hotelicopter. The name clearly relates to hotels, is fun, memorable, and gives the Google bots some red meat to chew on.
Our newly rebranded and redesigned site is the first major travel site to utilize Facebook Connect as its user system. This means that users can create an account on hotelicopter simply using their Facebook account credentials and instantly have their Facebook and hotelicopter accounts linked to each other. No need to recreate your social network either - it travels with you from Facebook to hotelicopter. We’ve also integrated TripAdvisor hotel reviews and many improvements to the user flow and feature set on our new site.
As we were scheduled to launch hotelicopter.com April 8th, we found ourselves in the fortunate position of launching a new brand based on a fictional flying hotel right after April Fool’s Day. Our launch campaign practically created itself: we would bring a flying hotel to life as an April Fool’s Day prank to build pre-launch buzz and drive inbound links to our new domain name. The Hotelicopter was born.
Mil-V12
The largest helicopter in the world is the Mil-V12, a Russian-made vehicle created in the 1950’s of which only two were ever made. If we were going to create a plausible flying hotel it had to be big. The Mil-V12 provided the perfect inspiration. We simply added an extra floor to house the Hotelicopter’s 18 luxurious rooms, yoga studio, art gallery, and koi pond - and four GE turbo-thrusters to provide the power necessary to lift and transport the extra weight.
The Hotelicopter
Once we had an idea of what our flying hotel would look like, we turned to the talented designers at PerspectX to create a 3D model of the Hotelicopter and make it come to life, and the equally talented Aidan Keith-Hynes at Starlight Productions to do the post-production work on the raw footage. We called Yotel, the English-based airport hotel chain, and asked if we could have permission to publish photos of their hotel rooms on our site and credit them with designing the interior of the Hotelicopter, and they agreed. We put a web site together in-house using a free WordPress template, and created a press release of Hotelicopter’s launch that was downloadable from the site (we did not, however, push our fictitious press release out over the wires, as we felt that would be crossing an ethical boundary). With a web site, photos, video, and a press release, we were armed with the content we needed to launch our campaign.
The next step was to build out the distribution network. This consisted of setting up accounts with the usual suspects - YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter - and providing visitors to our April Fool’s Day web site easy links to watch our video, join our fan page, and follow us in the twittersphere. We complemented these three communities by posting our high resolution video on Vimeo and posting our Hotelicopter photos on Flickr.
With the content and distribution networks in place, it was time to strike the match. That’s when the social news and bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit came in. Each of these channels provided us access to unique audiences of early adopters, or to coin Malcolm Gladwell’s terms from The Tipping Point: Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople.
With this campaign, our hook was simple: “Wow, check out the world’s first flying hotel!” Within a few hours of posting a few hooks, we caught our first big fish.
Measuring Campaign Buzz
Gizmodo, the top ten blog focused on consumer technology, posted at 6:20pm on Friday, March 27th about the Hotelicopter after being tipped off by a loyal reader (Kyle Redinger, the owner of the media site Cvillain - thanks Kyle!), and mayhem ensued. We had decided to host our April Fool’s Day web site at GoDaddy under a basic account, and our site was quickly brought to its knees from the ensuing traffic. We quickly upgraded our account to handle the extra load, but for several hours people had a hard time reaching our web site to learn more about the world’s first flying hotel. In hindsight, this may simply have contributed to the buzz - 130 people posted comments to the Gizmodo blog entry, with the general gist of the conversation revolving around the questionable veracity of this new vehicle.
Once Gizmodo posted their story, hundreds of amateur bloggers had an interesting story to post about and the visual candy to support it, and inbound links to www.hotelicopter.com started piling up. This grassroots momentum kept site traffic and buzz going at a steady rate for the next three days, catalyzed by celebrity tweets from David Pogue of The New York Times and Guy Kawasaki of AllTop.com and the perennial Internet conference circuit. Gizmodo’s post was followed up three days later, on March 30th, by sister site Engadget, the third most heavily-trafficked blog online. Again, the post was fairly straightforward, discussing the Hotelicopter as if it were real, albeit somewhat aerodynamically ill-conceived.
But this time, only two days before April Fool’s Day, readers dug a little deeper into the story and started calling Engadget out in the comments section for getting “punk’d” by The Hotelicopter. In a surprising move, Engadget actually pulled the post completely from their web site that night, most likely prompted by Gizmodo’s retraction post earlier in the day entitled The Hotelicopter Outed as a Fake. And Wired magazine posted an uppity blog post entitled Hotelicopter Hoax Flies Over Bloggers’ Heads - ironically it turned out - about how lame the other big blogs were to get punk’d by The Hotelicopter, even though they themselves incorrectly credited the source of the hoax and botched their fact-checking about the actual Russian Mil-V12 helicopter (which they were quickly taken to task for by their readers in the comments section).
Web Site Page Views
However, the story was far from dead. While Gizmodo, Wired and Boing-Boing were declaring The Hotelicopter a sham and incorrectly crediting Yotel with a “brilliant hoax,” plenty of people - the vast majority in fact - still believed The Hotelicopter to be real, discovering it on our web site, an amateur blog, or YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, or one of the many social bookmarking and news sites that were helping spread the word about our flying hotel. During all this we were tickled pink, as you can probably imagine, as the goal of our campaign was to generate buzz and inbound links to our site, and the growing controversy about the veracity of our flying concoction was helping drive both beyond our wildest expectations.
Over this period of time, our YouTube video became the most popular video in the Travel category, and ultimately one of the 25 most-viewed videos for the week. Another thing that truly amazed us during this time was the geographic distribution of our site traffic. In the four days between our site launch and April Fool’s Day, the top five cities driving traffic to our site were New York, London, Moscow, Amsterdam, and Budapest. The Russians were eating it up! We weren’t sure if they were confused as hell or laughing their asses off.
Between Engadget’s post and April Fool’s Day we were averaging between 4,000 and 8,000 visits, and about 20 to 40 tweets, an hour. And except for a miniscule pay-per-click advertising campaign placed on Facebook, this was a completely viral campaign. It was being driven entirely by the online community.
Geographic Distribution of Web Traffic
On Wednesday, April 1st, our campaign reached its climax. We woke up that morning to a big article in The Telegraph, one of the biggest newspapers in the UK: Millions of web users fall for hotelicopter April Fool. The Huffington Post, the most heavily-trafficked blog online, featured us in their post about Best April Fool’s Day Pranks and linked to our video. Ryan Seacrest and Kanye West featured us on their personal blogs. We were featured on Daily Candy’s web site and in their popular email newsletter. We were even called by The Today Show the evening before and told we were going to be featured on their April Fool’s Day segment, but were ultimately bumped by the controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s choice of a birthday gift to the Queen of England (an iPod, of course).
On April 1st, 300,000 people visited our site, and over 150,000 watched our video on YouTube. Countless more learned about The Hotelicopter from another site or a friend that had read about it online. As the day came to a close, we moved the April Fool’s Day site from www.hotelicopter.com into the subdirectory aprilfools.hotelicopter.com, and launched the hotelicopter splash screen in its place. We wanted to continue the sense of mystery surrounding hotelicopter, and leverage all the buzz towards the launch of our new hotel search engine on April 8th. So we created a countdown on the page, and directed people to sign up via Facebook, twitter, or email to be notified with the “real” hotelicopter went live.
hotelicopter splash screen
While traffic and buzz died down considerably after April 1st, there was still a low rumbling in the blogosphere and twitterverse about The Hotelicopter, and some discussion as to what it could be if it wasn’t a flying hotel. In retrospect, we might have been even better served if we had been able to launch our hotel search engine on April 2nd, but our technology team was working miracles as it was to accelerate our launch forward a week from our previous plans, and it simply wasn’t possible. That being said, we continued to attract those inbound links that are ever so important in building page rank on search engines, and we now had a secret we couldn’t wait to share with the world.
On April 8th, hotelicopter (the search engine) went live, and was immediately picked up by TechCrunch - One Brilliant Hoax Later, Hotelicopter Joins the Hotel Aggregation Fray and CNet - Hotelicopter is Real, Though Simply A Hotel Search Engine. Site traffic was comparable to that for April 1st. And when Google finally assigned us a Page Rank of 6 at the end of May (VibeAgent had been a 5), we knew our objective had been fulfilled. In the final accounting, our viral campaign generated 1.1 million page views, 500,000 video views, lots of great buzz and media coverage, a solid page rank for a brand new domain, new friends and followers, and perhaps most importantly of all, a great story to share with all of you that hopefully brings a smile to your face.
In a bit of a footnote to this story, the best reporting on our fictitious flying hotel was found on Snopes.com, the site that determines the veracity of all things. On April 23rd, they came out with the verdict on The Hotelicopter with this lead-in:
Some April Fool’s pranks are so good they continue to circulate and ensnare the unsuspecting long after April 1 has come and gone. The Hotelicopter hoax is another such example.
So with this blog post, I hope we can finally put this prank to bed. We continue to get emails from journalists and travel enthusiasts, primarily from the Middle East, Asia, and South America where they don’t celebrate April Fools Day, asking about The Hotelicopter and how they can book a flight or feature it in their luxury magazine. My answer to all of you out there still looking for a flying hotel is this: you might just find one if you search long and hard enough on www.hotelicopter.com, our hotel search engine…
