Public relations and marketing folks are always on the look out for ways to exploit April Fool’s day. I think one of this year’s best was SlideShare, which sent an email to many of its users saying:
You’re a SlideShare Rockstar
We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting
a LOT of views in the last 24 hours.Great job … you must be doing something right.;-)
Why don’t you tweet or blog this?
Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.
Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team
Unfortunately, it wasn’t true. But so many SlideShare users fell for the prank that Twitter and blog mentions for SlideShare shot up as the Twist and Blog Pulse graphs below show. It was an imaginative, but risk tactic and depends totally on the humour and goodwill of the business users who were victims. I can imagine many that might not see the funny side of it.
Great point of view! I think it was tactical and experimental, pushing the limits. Maybe Slideshare represents a brand that can challenge their community, after a long time of valued services.
Greetings from Chile.
JP
Stuart, Juan
It was an absolute disaster for Slideshare and take the time to read some comments from Slideshare in the links below and they recognise that. Kudos to them for dealing with complaints head on but the idea was an awful one.
Slideshare is a business tool – and they were trying to make people look like idiots in front of colleagues and clients. Not very smart.
http://robpermeable.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/punking-the-hand-that-feeds/
http://blog.slideshare.net/2009/04/01/happy-april-fools-day/
Steve, that's why I said it was a risk. The response has actually been very mixed, with some seeing the 'joke' and others taking offence. Personally, it's a risk I wouldn't have taken, even though I did think it was amusing.