SlideShare.net is in Gestation

I call them slidedecks. My dad calls them viewgraphs. I use OpenOffice Presentation. He uses PowerPoint. Whatever you use, if you’re in the professional world, I’m guessing that electronic presentations are a way of life. I’ll also take a wild guess that the presentations vary wildly in quality. But one thing I think we can all agree on is that a well-conceived, efficient presentation is a very effective method of communicating high level business concepts.

It’s this idea that SlideShare.net is banking on. Launched in early 2007, SlideShare is an online presentation sharing community. From the site:

SlideShare is the best way to get your slides out there on the web, so your ideas can be found and shared by a wide audience. Do you want to get the word out about your product or service? Do you want your slides to reach people who could not make it to your talk? Are you a teacher looking to share your lesson plans? …[L]et your slides do the talking!

Or, you can just view a quick presentation:

Like some of the other content sharing sites we’ve reviewed here at Tippingpoint Labs (Vimeo and Scribd come to mind), SlideShare is a channel that allows its users to upload and tag their presentations in all the common formats (yes, including Keynote), and make them viewable to the public and embeddable anywhere else. They offer apps for sharing within Facebook and LinkedIn. In terms of execution, SlideShare isn’t all that remarkable or groundbreaking. However, in browsing through some of their users’ presentations, I was very impressed with the wealth of knowledge freely available on the site. I believe that the future of the channel is in the future of the platform. Presentations created in PowerPoint and similar applications are becoming the de facto method in communication business pitches, corporate education, and most sorts of one-way communication.

The power of platform

Presentations of this kind are a unique kind of content as the author needs to find a good balance of graphic design and valuable content. Said content also needs to be efficiently presented. Too many words and you lose the audience. Too few, and you never get them in the first place. Overuse graphics or animations and it’s a distraction; but still, black text on a white background isn’t really attention grabbing. It’s no surprise that presentations have grown so as a communication platform. They’ve proved that a few bullet points with poignant and germane imagery can communicate as effectively on some topics as a 1,000-word brief or report. In the Internet age, we are consuming content differently and in much smaller pieces. They are invaluable documents to both producer and consumer as they often communicate the most important aspects of a theme or project in the business world and are frequently used as primary reference throughout the lifetime of a project. SlideShare.net knows this and, as a result, has great potential.

SlideShare.net in the Gestation phase of its Life Cycle

There is a robust and devoted community of producers on SlideShare who are creating some wonderfully creative presentations on topics ranging from the current economic crisis to Hannah Montana. And the quality runs the gamut “Web 2.0″ to “my 6-year-old made this.”

There are some really effective and valuable presentations within the channel, but to move on to Adoption and gain the kind of visibility in the social media space that sites like Scribd are enjoying, SlideShare will need to publicize its own best content more. On the homepage, SlideShare unfortunately pushes its content way down the page; not quite below the fold on my screen but far enough down that I’m going to need to scroll to find anything after the first featured presentation. There is a lot of valuable content on SlideShare, but I had to sift through a lot of unrelated presentations of dubious value to get there.

Periodically, SlideShare does run presentation competitions, and this is indeed a great way to draw in the creative types and encourage excellent content on the site. Where I think SlideShare can make a big splash is in connecting clients with small creative or consulting agencies; an eHarmoney for corporate entities. A future monetization strategy would be to charge for making these kinds of connections.

The Scribd factor

In terms of content shared, SlideShare offers a relatively narrow format: the electronic presentation. By comparison, Scribd pretty much trounces SlideShare; Scribd allows its users to upload presentations, in addition to e-books and other manner of text presentation. But I don’t find this particularly concerning. Scribd is much further along in their content lifecycle and have a much broader audience. SlideShare doesn’t need to beat Scribd, per se. However, they need to further cultivate their content offering, drawing in those people who create valuable presentations and promoting that content. With a more narrow audience of consumers, SlideShare offers its producers the potential for a focused audience looking for something more specific on the channel.

The takeaway

SlideShare.net has great potential as it’s exploiting a comprehensive social media model for the distribution of a newer method of communication: the electronic presentation. As applications like PowerPoint and Keynote become ever more prevalent in the business or collegiate world, the medium will continue to cultivate innovators creating better content meant for larger and more attentive audiences. SlideShare provides them access to that audience. A few small changes to its interface and better promotion of its own content will help propel it into the Adoption phase of its lifecycle, where bigger brands and agencies will begin to take notice of the value of the platform.

My question to you

Are you using presentations in your personal or work life? How? Would you find any value in distributing them to a larger audience?

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."