SlideShare April Fool's Joke Parts 1 and 2

SlideShare AFJ Part 1: Red Shoes Speak - Slideshare April Fool's Joke	SlideShare AFJ Part 2: Conference Call with Dan at SlideShare

If you’ve been following Red Shoes PR on Twitter and Vimeo these days you’d know that we were a little miffed about the SlideShare April Fool’s Joke. Here’s what happened - SlideShare added two extra zeros to everyone’s presentation views on April 1st as a joke. They then sent out emails to all of their subscribers calling them “SlideShare Rockstars” and sent the following message:

    Hi ___,

    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

What looked like overnight success for SlideShare users ended up being the work of the SlideShare team who had falsly increased views by a significant amount. Angry subscribers began to take their frustrations out on Twitter and the SlideShare blog, which disclosed  it was an April Fool’s Joke. Some users laughed it off and moved on, while others became quite upset after having spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out from where the flood of new viewers came.

This could seem like a harmless April Fool’s Joke, but here’s where it went wrong - SlideShare is a credible file sharing site that contains professional presentations created and uploaded by users. The only tracking mechanisms in place to gauge success are views, downloads, embeds and comments. Therefore, when SlideShare changed the number of views by two zeros they fudged one of the only measures of success.

At Red Shoes PR, we decided to let our voices be heard so we made a video with our thoughts about the prank. The video went live on Friday, April 3, and we received a call from Daniel Lu at SlideShare that day apologizing for what had happened. Dan asked if he could comment via a video recorded conference call.

Here’s what we learned. As companies begin using social media as a communications channel to engage, they are inevitably going to make mistakes. It’s what you do after the mistakes are made that say a lot about who you are as a company. SlideShare began immediately answering angry posts on their blog and via Twitter. They also monitored the online conversations and responded to those in a sincere and timely manner. They continue to use these opportunities as a way to turn the situation around.

Will Red Shoes PR still use SlideShare for posting our online presentations and e-books? Absolutely!  

What are your thoughts? Did they handle the situation well? What would you have advised them to do differently?