Last night, I was quite surprised to receive a message from Slideshare , informing me that one of my uploaded presentations had racked up more than 100,000 views. As much as I want to believe my professional musings and slides rock the world of advertising, I instantly felt something was fishy but couldn’t resist clicking on the link.
The original email read:
Hi tbuesing,
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
Slideshare RockStar, Twitter God, Social Media Buddha (image by Zen)
Sure enough, anyone can be a Rockstar of Powerpoint on April Fool’s Day. The #bestofslideshare search on Twitter revealed that many had taken enough time to “get it” (the joke). Some others stepped straight into the vanity trap and blasted their unexpected fame into the Twittersphere (and still do as I write this). It is a bit like watching people slip on a banana, me, snickering at poor dudes trying to act modest, yet beaming with pride that their “recent trip to Serbia and Montenegro” or “Home Networking 101” had received this gigantic audience boost. But it reveals two basic truths we all know about our social publishing habits.
- we do all of this mostly to get attention and kudos, we want to be “Social RockStars” (in our niches)
- our cycle of receiving, processing and publishing information has increased to such a pace where some people skip the processing part and just publish
Slideshare has by now received a lot of negative feedback, Jonathan Boutelle, one of the founders of Slideshare felt obliged to do a Kowtow on his Twitter stream, reading:
“#bestofslideshare Big “sorry, I f*d up” to our wonderful SlideShare community! We love you guys, and we weren’t trying to embarrass anyone.”
In my opinion, the criticism comes from people who have lost their sense of humour somewhere along the race for becoming the umpteenth “social media evangelist”. What’s your verdict?
Between 0 and 1 