How Slideshare (SlideScare) become the ultimate Fool on April Fool's

On April 1st (wasn't a great day for me....got up at 4.15am; totally messed up an appointment based on time zones and was 1 hour late in the process; had a flight canceled and ended up having to spend the night in a remote location), I received this e-mail:

Hi jaffejuice,

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

Like I'm ever going to tweet about increased views on Slideshare's behalf...however, just a little bit curious, I head on over to Slideshare and notice that my 2 year old presentations (I don't use this service much as I don't normally share my presentations publicly...sorry) have been viewed a whopping 100,000+ times.

Blown away, I do in fact decide to share this via Twitter and even make sure I use the suggested hashtag.

Here's my tweet:

woah - my 2 year old presentations on Slideshare have been viewed over 100K times; something must be wrong #bestofslideshare

Turns out, something was wrong...wrong with Slideshare that is, as they had decided to "prank" their community/customers by adding 2 zeroes to their presentation views.

When I found out, I was mad, uttering these tweets:

Dear Slideshare, You're a dopey bunch of children. Thanks for reminding me why I DON'T use your service

Long story short, I received a few lame responses from Slideshare and as someone who can take a joke and recognizes that there are far more important things in the world, I calmed down.

...but the reason why I'm (still) writing this post is that the damage has been done - not just with me, but moreover with their community.

Slideshare screwed up majorly and honestly, they only made matters worse with dopey predictable blog posts and canned or sterile conservative responses (as per their mea culpa blog post, which as of this posting has over 140 responses) and tweets to myself and others:

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.

Here are some of the customer responses:

Dumb Prank I sent that email to my board members .. that was the dumbest April Fools Joke.. Slideshare Ive got about 15k views on my presentations anyways [totally]..next time this happens, I will pull everything out to scribd or something else

Your prank was quite a good one. I thought it had got to be a prank - when I first saw it. But then I convinced myself that 30,010 people had indeed watched a small presentation on the start of The Holocaust...I thought it was just conceivable that, after 8 months of horror in the financial world, somewone (sic) would actually wake up...the(n) I found out. Some clown at work. So it is all just sad. Happily for your organization I took a medication for high blood pressure an hour ago. What I think about the security of my Slideshare account cannot be spoken about right now. I feel sick. But it is well known here that this week the CEO of the German Rail System was obliged to resign over a similar lapse in the security of private and corporate internet records. Neil McPherson laughing fit to vomit.

Okie Dokie Then.

Here's a recap of the mistakes and the resulting learnings/insights/takeaways:

1. Slideshare is a business and professional service. They are not YouTube (as per one reader comment) and should not act as such.
2. SPAMMING their customers via e-mail was never a good idea
3. Manipulating them (arguably in a self-serving way) by tricking them to blog/tweet is a worse idea
4. Messing around with data sent out huge concerns/signals as they pertained to security of data
5. This is another example {Jaffe soapbox on} of what happens when there is no strategy present - this isn't just applicable to brands/brand marketers {Jaffe soapbox off}
6. When planning an April Fool's Joke, remember to factor in different time zones (a mistake I made myself on 4/1/09). Many people received the e-mail in Australia on April 2nd!!!
7. Sometimes it's better to shut the hell up (another lesson I've learned first hand) - was a blog post really necessary? Perhaps. But in this case, another set of e-mails to genuinely apologize would have better
8. Responses that are banal and empty are worse than not responding at all
9. Turns out Slideshare lost a bunch of customers from this prank AND helped their competitor, Scribd gain visibility.
10. April Fool's jokes are lame. It's not funny if no one is laughing

Move on, people. Nothing more here to see.

Update: Rashmi Sinha, Slideshare's Co-founder and CEO has already contacted me and represented his and his company's perspective. I respect that.