Slideshare.net told me I was a rockstar – and left me feeling like an idiot
So yesterday was April fools day – a day where companies can be untrue and funny. First thing in the morning I tripped over my friend André’s blogpost that his wine community Adegga.com was buying the much larger wine community Cork’d. I totally fell for it – mainly because it would be remarkable strategic move. That was, right until I had tweeted it, looked at the date and hammered my head into the table. April fools day. sigh. Anyway I think the internet crowd was struck with a lot of weird stuff yesterday, some of it more funny than other.
Then during the afternoon I recieved a mail from slideshare.net saying that I was a slideshare rockstar, because my presentations have had a lot of traffic during the last 24 hours. And yep. my “why every company should be a rockband” presentation had around 100.000 views. I mean it didn’t take me long to figure out that something was wrong, and I thought that slideshare had been hacked or something. Later on I find out that it’s an april fools joke. Right. Ha ha.
Companies makes marketing stunts around april fools day every year which is great. Slideshare left me feel like an idiot. Why?
slideshare actively involved me in the marketing stunt by mailing me – it was in my face. Normally marketing stunts turn viral from the communities and from the media because people think they are cool. It’s not instantly in your face.
there was absolutely no value (no value) in it for me as a user of slideshare. They wanted me to tell everybody else and I did.
One of my golden rules in marketing involvement of communities is that if you are going to disturb people (fx. by mailing them) you should definetly give some value to the users.
Slideshare didn’t.
I feel like an naive idiot who has been used by a service that I don’t care about.
Well done.
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4 Responses
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Henriette
Hi Asbjørn – Well then it’s just me that can’t take a joke.
There’s a huge difference in this joke for me. Normally, as I state, jokes are made to be viral. They spammed their community in order to have their community make it a viral joke. There was no value in this for me as a user. Why didn’t they just do a blogpost like everybody else ? and why do I have to be a part of this ? I don’t care if I have used 5 secs or 5 mins or 5 hours figuring out what happened at slideshare. As Seth Godin once stated “just because you have my email, doesn’t give you the right to use it”. I can really understand why people are a bit upset, because they are bricks in a marketing scheme that they might not want to be in. So viral april fools jokes. YES!. User involving emails as a april fools joke ? I don’t think so. =)
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Yeah, well. I guess if it boils down to whether or not they should’ve sent out emails, perhaps you have a point.
To me, that just does not seem to have been the centre of the criticism. It looks as if what people are most upset by, is the fact that they fell for it, and not the means by which they were made to do so.
‘just because you have my email, doesn’t give you the right to use it’ – TRUE – unless you actively give that right to someone. Which I do believe the users of Slideshare have done on sign-up. (in anticipation of a reply to that comment, yes, they used in a questionable way:)
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The emails are somewhere very near the center of my criticism. I think it’s the “how much can you involve your users without them anticipating?” is the center of my criticism.
Dude, I fell for all the april fool jokes yesterday. Anyway this is a really interesting issue for me. How close can the brands involve? I mean where does the limit go ? I have always believed in “fail harder” – I hope the slideshare crew takes this as constructive criticism. They’ll come back brigther for sure.
I think I’m gonna have to respectfully disagree here.
This was a joke. For all intents and purposes, the Addega.com joke that you mentioned in your post had just as much – if not more – potential to have actual consequences (if, say advertisers and investors didn’t get it at first). I do believe one of the worst things to come out of the whole #bestofslideshare ordeal is a couple of bruised egos (and I’m not trying to bash you personally here, but speaking in broader terms).
The whole thing about arpil fools jokes is that people percieve something as being real, until realising that their were duped, and, depending on the level of vanity, this will always leave them feeling somewhat stupid, right?
I cannot think of any april fools jokes that actually added value to users – can you?
Also, we tend to want to deal with companies that are as ‘human’ as possible, right? Does the Slideshare prank (and certainly their apologies today) not display a level of humanity?
Maybe I’m way off here, but I really don’t get what the big hooha is all about. It did, however, get people to talk an awful lot about Slideshare today!
I think my best advice (for Danes, anyway) would be to always – ALWAYS – start the day by checking http://www.erdet1april.dk/