Straight from the mind

In my 1st post on SlideShare, I tried giving a low down on what SlideShare has in store for all and why it becomes an upcoming Social Media channel. In this post, I will try and put together a set of steps that businesses/companies could follow to make the best use of SlideShare to share information and their branding.

Create your Profile…
You need to start off by first creating your account and selecting the appropriate Account Type. For a business it would mostly be “company”, unless your a Marketing/PR firm or a Non-Profit who have their specific account types. Once you have confirmed your account, login and complete your profile by giving the description of your company, uploading your logo and entering the tags that best describe your company and the work done. It would be best to fill in every information in a detailed manner, as that is what people are going to look at first when they stumble upon your company on SlideShare.

Upload Great Content…
Now its time to dig out all the content(Tuesday TechTalk slides, White papers written by your employees, presentations that you made to your clients) that your company has generated over the years and is just lying under virtual dust in your Content Management System and post it to SlideShare. Any content that you think would be of great help to others and could draw some eyeballs to your account is a good post. Post content that acts as a proof to the profile information that you provided. Remember we are trying to use SlideShare not only as a knowledge sharing medium but also for your branding, so before you upload your content you need to dress it up.

1. Design 1 or 2 good templates and push your presentations in these templates before uploading them to SlideShare. By doing this people who have already viewed and liked some of your presentations before will be able to identify your other presentations in the search listings and prefer to pick them over others.
2. Let the first slide of your presentations have the company logo, authors name and company website along with the subject of the presentation.
3. Make sure your template has your company logo and/or your  company name in the footnote on every slide, certifying that the content is yours and at the same time giving it a professional look.
4. The last slide of each presentation could have a citation to the author, when and where was this presented, a link to the blog or document that briefly describes this presentation and the email id for feedback or more information on this presentation.

Publish your presentations with the appropriate title, description and tags so that people get a good idea of the presentation before they scan it slide-by-slide.

Socialize…
SlideShare provides quiet a few social networking features that would help you build your social graph. Start of by searching for people and company profiles in your field and start following them. Review their content and provide them with feedback, favorite presentations that you really liked, comment on them, provide them with a link to your own presentations on the same topic and ask for feedback. Basically you need to start a conversation, social media is all about starting a conversation, collaborating with people and  building communities.

Share your Content…
Socializing within SlideShare is a good thing to do, but you can even attract people from outside SlideShare by embedding and sharing your presentations on blogs and other social networking platforms. Make sure that you blog about each of your presentation giving in-depth explanation of your presentation and using the embed code provided by SlideShare to embed your presentation in your blog post. SlideShare has even built apps. on Facebook and LinkedIn, so you could even add these apps to display your content on your companies profile or fan page on these social networks.

One of my personal favorite offerings from SlideShare are their wide range of widgets and presentation playlists that you can embed on your blog and website to display a feed of your presentations.

SlideShare Business…
SlideShare recently launched SlideShare Business that provides a new way to reach professional audience, connect with more and the right people by advertising your content to them, but I would recommend to go for this only after you have built a good profile by following the above few steps.

The above steps provided by me are by no means exhaustive, there would be many other ways by which you could make use of SlideShare as a social media channel to promote your company and its work.

How are you using SlideShare to promote your business? Share it with me in the comments

A lot has been said and written about how businesses are using the stalwarts of social media like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube to build their brand name and connect with the masses. All these channels being consumer facing portals have proven to be the best for businesses that directly serve individual consumers with products and services. When it comes to the Business to Business angle, it is the more professional network LinkedIn that has helped businesses leverage on its social graph of professionals. But it seems like there is a new player on the block in the form of SlideShare.

SlideShare is a business media site for managing and sharing presentations and documents and currently boasts of having over 23 million visitors that view over 60 million pages every month. Going ahead in this post, I will be giving you a low down about SlideShare and why it becomes a critical element of the Professional Social Media Channels

Storing and Sharing…
SlideShare allows you to upload and share presentations, documents and spreadsheets of a wide variety of formats whether its from Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. It even supports upload via email and import from Google docs. Your files can be shared publicly  to all on the web or privately to some SlideShare users. You or the people your sharing the file with can even download your file in the same format as uploaded. Each presentation also comes with and embed code which can be used to embed it on blogs or other websites.

Accounts…
SlideShare started of with accounts for individuals but has recently launched 7 new account types for Companies, Non-Profits, Universities etc. So unlike before when companies created accounts and had to even specify DOB and gender of the company, now they can switch to the company account type where their profile page will have company specific options. Very soon SlideShare would be launching custom features for different account.

Networking…
SlideShare has a decent set of networking tools that you can leverage upon to build your social graph. You can follow like minded people to get their latest updates. You can favorite a presentation for future reference. You can create or join groups of users that share similar interests as you and interact with them by posting on the profile wall.

Widgets and Applications…
SlideShare has an simple interface to create Widgets and Presentation Packs that can be embedded on your blog or website to provide a feed of your presentations to your visitors. The Facebook and LinkedIn Applications allow you add a presentation gallery box on your profile and can be viewed by your connections.

Slidecasting…
Slidecasts are nothing but mashups of SlideShare presentations and streaming MP3.On SlideShare, in a few simple steps you can  create a Slidecast thus making your slides more meaning full and sending the right message to the viewers.

SlideShare Business…
SlideShare recently launched SlideShare Business that provides a new way to reach professional audience, connect with more and the right people by advertising your content to them. With AdShare you can promote your content to a community of professionals, by displaying your document next to documents on SlideShare that are from the same category or of similar content. LeadShare converts your content visitors into leads by enabling you to add a lead form within your presentations. This is more like a replacement of the traditional white paper and micro site campaigns.

You may find many file storing/sharing applications online, but the wide variety of features and the huge open community that you can share your content with makes SlideShare a great social media channel to try out.

This post originally appeared on Xoriant’s Blog, this is my 1st contribution to their official Blog.

Over the past decade the explosion of Social Networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has drastically changed the way how people interact socially.  The spectrum of its usability has grown widely since its inception, from users just building profiles and making friends to businesses using it for branding & interacting with their consumers, recruitment firms to find potential employees, science communities for exchange of ideas, non-profits for spreading social good and by students & teachers as a communication tool.This growth in its usability is due the hundreds of millions of active users together spending billions of minutes everyday on these sites building profiles, making status updates, uploading photos and building social graphs making them information rich.

While these sites have built some of the best tools on the world wide web, the opening up of their product to developers via APIs in the past 3 years have spawned “developer ecosystems” that build applications over popular services like Twitter and Facebook that help a person do everything from network with travelers to play social online games. Given below is a brief of 3 Social Networking Developer Ecosystems that would help you to better understand your options.

Facebook:
Facebook launched the Facebook platform in May 2007 for application developers that provides a framework to develop applications that would render within facebook.com and interact with core Facebook features.  Simultaineously a markup language called the Facebook Markup Language(FBML) was also introduced that is used to give applications the Facebook “look and feel”  and hook into several Facebook integration points, including the profile, profile actions, Facebook canvas, News Feed and Mini-Feed.  Since then, tens of thousands of applications have been built on top of the Facebook platform. Later on, Facebook Query Language (FQL) was introduced that allows you to use a SQL-style interface to  query Facebook social data without using the API. While most platforms force developers to use iFrames if they want to embed javascript within the application, Facebook answered this question with the introduction of FBJS that allowed developers to manipulate markup on the fly, animation and AJAX making applications more dynamic. Today, Facebook has over 350,000+ applications that play a critical role in maximizing Facebook’s active user base. Being the most popular application on Facebook, “Farmville” currently has over 60 million monthly active users.

In late 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect that allows developers to let users login to their websites with their Facebook credentials. It even allows other Facebook features, like your friend list and friend invite features to be implemented on your website, which can in turn send data back to Facebook as News Feeds. With over 15K websites already utilizing Facebook Connect, it has now become a must have feature for every social website for 2 main reasons : (1) Users do not have to go through the process of registering on your website if they are a Facebook user, your website can directly pull info from the users Facebook profile and (2) Your web site gets tons of exposure on Facebook as the users actvities on your site get posted to his Facebook profile.

Facebook has even gone a step further in encouraging developers by introducing the fbFund where developers can submit their applications to qualify for investments to grow their venture.

Twitter:
Twitter is one of the best examples of an very Open API and has provided developers a opportunity to build a full-fledged business by using it. Within a short span of time this ecosystem has transformed into a mainstream phenomenon with the development of Twitter apps that do everything from managing your twitter profile to analyzing tweets for real world trends. The Twitter API is nothing but a simple service that provides RESTfull access to the Twitter database and activity streams. Twitter initially started of with the basic authentication by which developers send the users credentials in the header of the HTTP request. But this being insecure and difficult to track hence in early 2009 they integrated the OAuth pattern of integration into the REST API permitting users a seamless experience of login into a 3rd party website using their Twitter account.

Twitter lacks many features in its pursuit of for simplicity and this gives openings to developers to fill the holes. Currently around 80% of Twitter’s usage is via 3rd party apps. and the Twitter API has 10x the traffic of its website. Twitter does not have 300+ million active user but it has momentum, excitement and virility which can cause your application to go from zero to a million users in a matter of days or weeks. Twitter is fast growing and new features are getting added regularly, requiring your application to adapt to it at the same time. A major problem with the Twitter ecosystem is its stability, so you have to make sure that your application doesn’t break and throw heaps of code when the API is down.

MySpace:
MySpace first got into the platform party by teaming with Google and a number of other social networks against the Facebook platform and releasing OpenSocial in November 2007, which were a set of API’s that would make applications interoperable with any social network system that supports it. The patnership spearheaded an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. Later on in early 2008 MySpace  independently launched the MySpace Developer Platform(MDP) that supports the OpenSocial model to enhance the overall experience of users through the development of Social Applications.

MySpace has undertaken a recent expansion of their platform through the MySpaceID project. MySpaceID provides Developers the opportunity to access user identities within the context of third-party environments. The main components of the MySpace platform are pretty similar to that of Facebook, but since MySpace supports the OpenSocial model the same application can be ported to any other social network with just a few minor tweaks to the code. With just around 15k apps in the MySpace apps Gallery and just a few websites integrating with MySpaceID, the Facebook ecosytem emerges as the clear winner in this case.

No doubt that these 3 ecosystems are the best and most established but they aren’t the only ones. Networks like Bebo, Yahoo, Friendster and the recently launched Google Wave have opened up their set of API’s that would allow you to reach millions of users through your applications. All these platforms are fast-growing and frequently-changing for the good, so as a developer even though you have a lot of choice with the ecosystems, it is suggested that you pick one ecosystem that you are a big fan of and program for it as keeping pace with all the ecosystems would be a real challenging task.

References : Mashable