I have personally not been a fan of April fools for as long as i can remember, when April 1st sets in i just laugh about the many pranks people pull off on other friends.
Allow me to recount one of the very popular and hilarious ones i witnessed. It was some 10 years ago and the Late Komla Afeke Dumor then host of the most popular morning show; the Super Morning show announced on prime time radio he was getting married, and because it was a well planned prank he began the announcements way ahead of the one day set aside for pranks. People were excited and were sending in congratulatory messages, even Ministers of state fell for the prank. Now my Dad was an avid listener of Komla Dumor and the Super morning show and still is. Though my Dad did not know Komla personally he spoke of him as tho he did, his eyes would light up at the sound of Komla’s voice at 6am every weekday and would stay glued till 10am (when Komla’s show ended), so it was not strange when my dad hinted to us he would be attending that wedding (Though he eventually did not). Long story short many people gathered at the church to congratulate him only to realize his bride was Mawuko Zormelo a coworker at Joy FM.
The team at Sika is one vibrant one, bustling with ideas, creativity and innovation, at Sika we are always thinking of better and more innovative ways of doing one thing. As April fool was drawing close i never thought of a prank even on a personal level. Paul (co-Founder) called me on FaceTime from San Francisco, I had just returned from work and was in my lazy mood, when i picked up he showed me a headline on TechCrunch “PayPal acquires SIKA for $216 million ahead of its launch to bring its payments platform to more merchants, service providers in Africa!“ honestly i was fooled, my heart skipped and i asked if it was for real? then he says nope its a prank and i think we should do this tomorrow.
Now I was thinking about all the things that could go wrong, the calls, the messages the insults etc but i just said “yes lets do this”. we went through the text and made a few changes and then scheduled the post for 9am the next day. In bed I kept thinking of all the things that could go wrong again, I thought about consumer sentiments, what competition would make of it, how the media would take it, my friends and all of that, it was mixed feelings, a part of me said “no don’t do it” and a part of me was just laid back. To be honest, I even thought of what i would have done if the news were true, all the people I would call, all the things I would buy ha! I went to bed with the thoughts.
Morning came, it was about 6am and though I am not the type of person who picks my phone immediately I wake up, this time i did. Our telegram group page had about 16 unread messages, apparently the team was also fired up for it and had had some discussion before they all retired to bed the day before. At 9am the post was live, within 10 minutes over 5 people had shared it, friends had started messaging me privately to congratulate me (though I never replied), the re-posts, re-shares and re-tweets were multiplying, my phone was on fire, I began receiving messages to avail myself for interviews, friends wanted to come over for a celebration, one friend jokingly messaged to ask for a million dollars, I was receiving 5 friend requests every 10 mins from businesses, super models, celebrities et all. While all of this was happening only a few people were aware of what day it was, tho people even commented on the post that it was a prank most people were still sure it was true, by 10:00 our joke had gone serious, radio stations announced it, a friend on Facebook sent me a message that he had heard them congratulate us (Myself and Paul) on Live FM, at this point I was just scared and waiting for what could go wrong.
by 11:00 am my phone had died (the battery had run out) and I had to wait till i get to the office to charge it, while in that darkness I kept thinking what are people saying? where has our prank gotten to? who has seen it? who believes it?. At the office after juicing up my phone for about 5 minutes and connected to the wifi, Whatsapp had recorded 70 new messages, twitter had 13 new notifications and Facebook had 43, I was shocked, social media was actively talking about our prank. Now it was about 12:00.
Now the purpose of me writing this post is to state out a few observations I made during all of this.
- People were surprised with mixed feelings (Good and bad).
- People had forgotten what day it was.
- People don’t read the fine print, they just read headlines.
- People are quick to be the first to break some news.
- Many people didn’t like that they were pranked but were surprised as to how bold we were to have pulled of a prank of this nature.
The PR benefits for Sika were enormous
- We had many new signups on our beta signup database
- Individually we made many new friends on social media
- Our brand had unpaid live presenter mentions on radio
- We had attained some level of brand awareness
This activity has sparked of a new way of thinking for us at Sika. Our April Fool’s joke surprised our audience, It even shock some and left some in awe – in a good way. Surprise is a powerful trigger to get people to react and engage, engagement is always a good thing.
We haven’t relented in our quest to make banking and remitting more convenient while secure, we are yet to launch Sika. and we are excited about the possibilities our app would place in the hands of our users. We are still beta testing and you are free to apply to join the beta list here.
If you were fooled just laugh it off.
#SikaIsComing
Here are a few of the comments about the April Fool prank. kindly add your comments in the comment box below.
