Seeborg Kit - Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business

Present Yourself

Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business

Kit Seeborg

Andrea Meyer

Beijing Cambridge Farnham Kln Sebastopol Tokyo

For Calvin and Nathan. Every day you make me the worlds proudest mom.

Kit Seeborg

For my husband, Dana, for his patience, wit, and steadfast support.

Andrea Meyer

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Foreword

W HEN K IT TOLD ME she was thinking of writing a book, I was thrilled for her. When I learned that the book was about SlideShare, I was thrilled for SlideShare as well.

As the content editor for SlideShare, Kit has come to understand SlideShare deeply. She understands what motivates the user, what makes their content popular, what brings them back again and again. She has learned this by reviewing thousands of presentations, talking to hundreds of users, whether by email or via Twitter, by conducting interviews or simply running into them at conferences.

When Kit wrote for us, I was struck again and again by her deep understanding of the social web experience and empathy for the people who inhabit such siteswhether to share their content and expertise, or to connect with others. Many people specialize in either consumer or B2B. Kits understanding bridges individuals and businesses.

If you are considering this book, you are either using social sites to share your content or are planning to start sharing content. Perhaps you have years of content on your hard drive and have been considering how to best put it to use. Or maybe you are doing a startup and want to do marketing without any budget. Or perhaps you want to improve your mid-size companys web footprint. Regardless of the specific goal, there is an art to sharing content and getting noticed on SlideShare. There is no better guide than Kit on your road to discovering how to use SlideShare for fun and profit.

Cofounder and CEO of SlideShare San Francisco, California April 26, 2013

Rashmi Sinha

P RESENTING AN IDEA IS one of oldest ways that people communicate with each other. It is the basis for innovation, collaboration, and, in some cases, survival. Presentations have traditionally focused on presenting an idea, a product, summaries of work, a story, or a myth. Great presenters know that its not just the content of the message that matters; its the way in which it is conveyed.

With the introduction of SlideShare in 2006, suddenly presenters could publicly publish and share their PowerPoint presentations. Content creators could now get their presentations in front of many more people than the audience in the room of a live event. In addition, viewers could see how other public speakers designed and constructed the slidedecks. People could publish and consume content all in the same place. This has led to all kinds of shared learning and creativity for public speaking and information design professionals.

Started as YouTube for PowerPoint, SlideShare is now a full-scale multimedia publishing platform. Its open API allows for partnerships with companies such as SalesForce, HootSuite, and HaikuDeck. With the acquisition of SlideShare by LinkedIn in 2012, a whole new world of opportunities continues to open up. The relationship between presenting oneself or ones company is being integrated into the largest professional social network in the world.

With the growth of a sharing economy and the democratization of content, traffic to SlideShare has steadily increased since its launch. People began to realize that if they had content published on SlideShare and someone searched for their name, the SlideShare account would display in search results ahead of their own website! Thats when SlideShare users started to upload presentations, write a blog post on their own sites, and embed the presentation from their SlideShare accounts.

A whole new wave of presentation designers has emerged, from agencies (such as Jess3, Column Five, Slides That Rock, Empowered Presentations, and Ethos3) to individuals (such as Gwyneth Jones, Jonathon Colman, and Paul Saunders) who design their own presentations in addition to working full time. And presentation designers such as David Crandall, Mars Dorian, and Jesse Desjardins have made their mark on the evolution of presentation design style.

Before SlideShare, speakers would offer to send their slidedecks to audience members. That entailed a lot of manual labor and didnt allow for commenting or sharing on social networks. The content creator had no idea whether the slidedeck was viewed or shared with others. Now, when you attend a professional conference or tune in to an online webinar, you will likely hear the presenter say, The slides will be on SlideShare. As SlideShare continues to add more functionality and sharing capabilities, the power of publishing on its platform increasesall the more reason to create and publish presentations.

As we talked with leaders in presentation design and communications, we heard many stories of creative ways people are using SlideShare. But few people were using the platform to its full potential. Some companies were using it as a key part of their online marketing, but hadnt really thought much about SEO. Others were putting beautiful and cool artistry into their presentation design, but werent using tags and keywords to generate traffic to their channels. How can we get people and businesses to use all of the capabilities that SlideShare offers, and build their businessesbe they corporations, individuals, students, nonprofits, or startups? We agreed that we needed to create something that was not only informative, but also useful.

So here it is: not just a handbook for using SlideShare, but a comprehensive guide for incorporating presentations into all aspects of your communications.

Now get out there and present yourself!