Breaking News – George Clooney Dead?

As we began brainstorming ideas for our next blog post, a traumatic incident happened to one of our blog team members. We let her use this space to do two things: 1) prove a point 2) get over her initial shock

…… “Breaking News – George Clooney Dead?”

Let me ask you this? If this was a headline thrown at you – how many of you would actually pause to read further? Going by how celebrity obsessed this nation is, we are going to say at least 50% of you (we will check our Word Press stats later today to confirm!!). In fact, adding death to the mix might have propelled that percentage higher… We can’t remember the number of facebook status updates dedicated to MJ but we are inching towards EVERYONES!

Well one of our blog members formed a part of that 50%. She was having a heated debate with her uncle last evening on the ancestry of George Clooney.  Her uncle claimed he was from New Zealand, she claimed he was all American (turns out he has a mixed ancestry of Irish, German, and English but that’s what Wikipedia, our source for everything George told us – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Clooney.)

So in order to justify her argument, she decided to whip out her handy dandy i-phone and simply do what any rational human being would do – she googled “George Clooney New Zealand”.. in fact google actually completed the search for her! (PS – we recommend you google those words as well to see what happens.)

As google pulls out it’s search page, the top hit was this ” Actor – George Clooney Falls To His Death In New Zealand“. (http://george.clooney.mediafetcher.com/news/top_stories/actor_new_zealand.php). TOP HIT!!!

Our blog member did the only thing she could – she started parading around the house screaming “george clooney is dead, george clooney is dead”…she denies bursting into tears but we know the truth!

Her uncle’s response – “No, he was only arrested last evening.” Obviously, her uncle wasn’t really concerned!

The point being – people will actually say anything! (we want to give credit to the website creators – FANTASTIC MARKETING IDEA.)  But the truth is – the story isn’t true. I had to physically open the page to confirm the truth and even then, it was only at the far bottom of the page, in really tiny font that I read: 

FAKE… THIS STORY IS 100% FAKE! this is an entertainment website, and this is a totally fake article based on zero truth and is a complete work of fiction for entertainment purposes! this story was dynamically generated using a generic ‘template’ and is not factual. Any reference to specific individuals has been 100% fabricated by web site visitors who have created fake stories by entering a name into a blank ‘non-specific’ template for the purpose of entertainment. For sub-domain info, name removal requests and additional use restrictions: FakeAWish.com 
Copyright © 2011 FakeAWish.com All rights reserved.

Point proven…?!!! Tell us what you think?

{Research revealed that people will do anything to get internet traffic. Take for example – a You Tube non-Justin Bieber video…. The user only put “Justin Bieber” in the title to get users. We can’t tell you how many of these videos exist, we can tell you however they have over a million hits! (we might have just tagged Justin Bieber in this post for hits too!)}

– The CampusNow Team

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Given this little experiment, we want to take this opportunity  to tell you about a feature on our website (www.campusnow.com) called CNOW. CNOW  provides you with a continuous news feed on everything from events around your University to news that would impact you and your University. We have a really cool contest coming out referencing CNOW so look out for it on our Facebook page – www.facebook.com/CampusNow.