We celebrated April Fools Day with a little prank: views on your presentations have an extra two zeros on them. We hope you find this funny. Your views will be rolled back to normal in a few hours.
You can see tweets about this prank on twitter … we asked people to mark their tweets with #bestofslideshare in an email we sent out.
We sincerely apologize if we annoyed you … we notice from the reactions on twitter that some people are not amused.
Update: We’ve always loved our users and will continue to do so in future, the joke notwithstanding. If our prank upset you, we’re sorry.
Update Again: Actual view counts have now been restored. Its all over and back to normal!
Please check out SlideShare CEO’s follow-up post : Lessons learned from an April Fool’s prank
The #1 featured presentation on the front page of SlideShare should be a humble and contrite apology acknowledging the issues and concerns of its user-base. One look at your home page and someone might easily assume you folks are ashamed, embarrassed and hopeful that this goes away quietly. You should embrace your mistake, not try and hide from it.
Don’t fool yourselves into thinking this was a stunt with a 50/50 hit/miss ratio. It was not a “partial success with some people.” If any marketer ever does anything that annoys, frustrates or angers as many people as you have, the idea was an outright, unmitigated failure. The fact that there are some people who think others need to “lighten up” or that your prank was “a good one – haha” does not absolve you, nor does it diminish the need for you to take every step possible to express your regrets and apologies.
If this blog thread is the only place one can find an apology or explanation, SlideShare will have failed at handling a failure — a double fail.
Folks, we are listening and discussing this internally and deciding on the best way to move forward. Unlike the April Fool’s prank (which we thought up in a day) we are taking time to think things through and decide how we communicate with our community our this incident which has made us think deeply about what SlideShare means to our users.
For those who are saying that we did not respond enough, many of our team members have done nothing else but respond to our users for past day and half. You can see this on Twitter (under our various team accounts), on blogs, and in many personal emails. Remember, we are a small company with two people who do community work. There is no PR / marketing agency.
Please stay tuned…
Thanx! I had a good laugh at myself because realized where these two zeroes popped up from only next morning… Completely forgot about this Fool’s Day. ^_^ TIt was really cute and funny
@Nina Krympenko
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing
Hi Rashmi
As I said in a blog post on “Have Slideshare Avoided Their Ratner Moment?” (http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/have-slideshare-avoided-their-ratner-moment/) I do feel that you are aware that, for many (but not all) Slideshare users you made a mistake.
However I do appreciate the effort you have made in responding on various blog posts. And I also admire your ‘finely tuned antennae’ which helped you spot the negative feedback you have received and respond appropriately.
Thank you for the apology, this shows the integrity of the company that misteps, listens, apologizes and moves on.
I’m still going to be a slideshare user, thanks!
supportive, Jeremiah
It’s cool. April fooled maybe but hey the boss was happy with the numbers! Could you fool me a few more times so I can forward the numbers. HA HA
It looks like the damage was done and everyone is moving on… if not a little worse for the wear.
Guys, Great article and very very interesting blog. That’s one thing I’m really looking forward. Looking forward to reading more from you next week.
Quite an informative blog, good of you to share. Great to know not everything online is rubbish!
Just thought i would comment and say neat theme, did you code it yourself? Lookswonderful.
Hey There. First of all nice website. Thanks a lot for making this public. I love telekinesis.
Found your blog on google , thanks for the information. Will bookmark and come back later