Are Google the king of Free advertising.This is off CFM topic but this kind of thing amazes me. Well incase you've only just turned on your PC since March i'll bring you up to speed. Google has got a "new service" (apparently so, but this will be explained later), anyway the new service is GMail "A Google approach to email". When you sign up you get 1000 megabytes of free storage which will mean you should never need to delete another message again (do i want that amount of sh%t building up?). Now with a 1gb of storage that's a lot of emails and too find the one Aunt Maud sent two years ago you can use the power of Google to search for it.

So far so good. So what's bad about this? They did the press release on April 1st, or better still April Fools day. This led to a lot of speculation about the validity of the article. Which meant blogs all over the world were discussing either how amazing the "new" service was, or how amazing the hoax was. AMAZING! From the word go they had the best free advertising going - word of mouth. A break down of how free, quick and easy it is:

• They're Google so the world knows who they are and even a subtle change in design to their site causes shockwave
• They run Google News one of the best online news aggregators which is becoming increasingly popular on the web. So when this story runs it gets picked up not only by newspapers (media) but by bloggers and other sites i.e. Slashdot
• By they way Google own Blogger.com and must index that regularly.

That's it, they released one Press release which would got high attention anyway but by doing it on April Fools day they not only make news the make discussions and debates. If you're bored do a search on Google for Google Gmail and you'll see 13,000 pages already, and most of them forums.

If it is a Haox then Google have screwed up a perfectly good a viable ad campaign, but i don't think they have. Personally i think Google has probably pulled of one of the best web/news campaigns ever.

p.s. By they way another reason for it to be real is that Google actual Fools joke is here http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html