Twitter exploded on Thursday afternoon, with the trending tweet of GoDaddy CEO. This was based on a video of Bob Parsons, the CEO of GoDaddy.com shooting a an elephant in Zimbabwe. Time.com had the highest Top tweet, stating “Shoots an elephant for a good cause. Too bad he’s wrong” with a link to their article. The other top tweets were calls to move your domain off of GoDaddy.com, and onto other domains.
Among the other news tied into this trending tweet were the several companies that are jumping on board. One domain hosting company, called Namecheap, is offering to make donations to African elephants on your behalf if you sign up with them in the very near future.
This blog is not commenting on whether what he did was right or wrong. We are curious, as far as a marketing decision is concerned, was this a bad move?
GoDaddy.com marketing, for the last several years, has been based around attractive woman taking their clothes off. The question of whether Danica Patrick is ever going to bare all on GoDaddy’s site is always in question. Is there target demographic, who is not offended by the sexual material of their advertising campaigns now, going to be hugely offended by the CEO killing an elephant?
Putting any moral judgement aside, and looking at this incident as a strictly marketing opportunity, do you feel that Bob Parson’s video is going to hurt Go Daddy? The ideas of “No news is good news” and “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” are no longer true, and several companies have benefitted from and had losses caused by viral campaigns for or against them on different social media channels.
What is your opinion?