I was a bit confused today when tweets about elephants started popping up in our company Twitter feed. Elephants aren’t a big topic in the web hosting industry (unless you’re EasySpace and your logo is an elephant), and my preferred topics are probably zombies and biscuits with a bit of tech thrown in; luckily our customers like those things too. Anyway, the whole elephant thing turned out to be possibly the biggest marketing fail I’ve ever heard of.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, basically the CEO of GoDaddy.com shot an elephant in Zimbabwe. And took a video of it which included promotional GoDaddy hats. And then posted it on the GoDaddy website. I’m not going to link directly to it on principle, so here’s a link to the Google results and you can pick your result of choice.
To be honest, I haven’t even watched the video because I really hate that kind of stuff. Most of twitter seems to be going mental though. What’s interesting is that Namecheap.com has actually set up a marketing campaign for half price .com/.net/.org domain name transfers and they’re apparently going to donate $1 from each to SavetheElephants.org. They’ve also paid for a promoted tweet to draw attention to it. I’m actually torn as to whether this is a stroke of genius or just a really low, opportunistic thing to do. At least it helps the elephants I guess…and it’s getting a LOT of coverage. Now all that’s needed is a Flash/HTML5 game where you can run Bob Parsons over with a herd of elephants and whoever does it is guaranteed to go viral.
Unfortunately, I do actually have a domain name with GoDaddy, because I picked up one in one of their auctions several months ago. I’m still happy to pay the full transfer cost even though I have a few months of hosting left, on principle.
PS Sorry for being to rubbish at returning comments recently, I’ll do it before the weekend!
5 Comments
Hi, nice blog here!
01/04/2011 at 11:41 amjust found out the story of the elephant article .. :lol:
Holy crap, I never heard of that Godaddy thing! I’ve never liked Godaddy at all, and even though their domain names are supposedly cheap, I’ve never gotten one from there. Unfortunately, I have to deal with Godaddy, still, for work. =(
01/04/2011 at 3:17 pmUh… I cannot understand why they thought that putting that video online would be a good idea at all. To me, it’s common sense that shooting an endangered species is bad. Luckily, my domain is registered with NameCheap because they were just a little big cheaper when I registered.
11/04/2011 at 7:38 pmI will never understand how people can do that – it’s absolutely barbaric. I’m not really surprised there was uproar. What NameCheap did was, admittedly, a good thing. But the fact they did it clearly for the wrong reason leaves quite a deficit in the sentiment. Then again there really aren’t limits to what companies will do to progress in the marketing world – as they say, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Or an man-shoot-elephant world, as the case may be..
Loving your layout :)
20/04/2011 at 11:48 pmI heard about this but never read further into it. I think what NameCheap did was an awesome idea, but at the same time – definitely catty. Seems like it worked to their advantage though.
27/04/2011 at 3:47 am