Preface

PRESENTING 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 it’s not just the content of the message that matters; it’s 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 one’s 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! That’s 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 didn’t 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 increases—all 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 hadn’t really thought much about SEO. Others were putting beautiful and cool artistry into their presentation design, but weren’t 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 businesses—be 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!

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for:

  • Companies of all sizes—from large corporations to small businesses and startups—that want to use the full capabilities of SlideShare to connect with their customers and grow their businesses.

  • Professionals in all industries who want to showcase their expertise and build their personal brand to get promotions, new jobs, and new opportunities.

  • Governments (local, state, and national) as well as nonprofits that want to inform and report to their constituencies, boards, and existing and potential donors.

  • Marketers, professional speakers, and business owners in particular will learn how to include presentations in all aspects of a business and how to use SlideShare as an essential tool in marketing and growing their organizations.

How to Use This Book

If you’re new to SlideShare, Chapter 2 will guide you through the registration process and get you quickly to uploading presentations. But even if you are already using SlideShare, that chapter is still worth a look, because it includes some great ways to use SlideShare that you might not have thought of.

This isn’t a design book. We defer to the brilliance of Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, Bruce Gabrielle, and Carmine Gallo for presentation design guidance.

Present Yourself is designed to be a useful reference and inspiration as you discover new opportunities to use presentations. Each chapter contains “Real-World Example” sidebars, case studies of how companies and individuals are using SlideShare. You can read the book all the way through, but we also hope that you’ll keep it on hand for ideas and information as your career or organization evolves. We will continue to post updates about SlideShare and presentations in general on the book’s website:

http://www.presentyourselfbook.com

The book is organized into the following chapters:

  • Chapter 1

    This chapter explains the trends toward visual communication in business. It explores the technologies that make visual communication possible and how these trends impact presentation design.

  • Chapter 2

    This chapter walks you through the steps of opening a SlideShare account, uploading presentations, and sharing them with others. It describes the power of sharing, as well as the features and benefits of upgrading to a PRO account.

  • Chapter 3

    Events and public speaking play a key role in building community and thought leadership for your organization and for your career. This chapter shows how SlideShare is used in all stages of event planning and execution.

  • Chapter 4

    This chapter focuses on the elements of content marketing that make it effective. You’ll learn how presentations, storytelling, and curation fit into a content marketing strategy. The chapter includes case studies of how successful companies are using SlideShare in their content marketing strategies to build their brands and increase SEO.

  • Chapter 5

    There is more to a sales presentation than just a pretty PowerPoint. This chapter explains how to incorporate research, prospecting, and closing the sale into presentation strategy.

  • Chapter 6

    In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use SlideShare for research and how sharing presentations on SlideShare is an effective method of collaborating within teams and between companies and their clients.

  • Chapter 7

    This chapter examines trends in job search, personal branding, résumés, and career management. It delineates how to use presentations in recruiting and how presentations can differentiate you or your company in the job market.

  • Chapter 8

    This chapter showcases the ways that startups, nonprofits, journalists, and government agencies use SlideShare to meet their business needs. You’ll learn the role of presentations in each of these areas and see case studies of each in action.

Why We Wrote This Book (from Kit)

I started reading Rashmi Sinha’s blog in 1999, when she was a researcher at UC Berkeley after receiving her PhD in cognitive neuropsychology from Brown University. In 2006, we met in person at the Information Architecture Summit in Vancouver, B.C. This was the same year that she, her brother Amit Ranjan, and her husband Jon Boutelle started working on an idea they called SlideShare. From a shared office in Mountain View, Rashmi and Jon collaborated with Amit, who was building the development team in New Delhi, India. The idea grew into a company and the office moved north to San Francisco.

I would periodically travel to San Francisco for meetings and crash at Rashmi and Jon’s apartment in the Mission District. One Sunday morning in 2010, Rashmi and I were talking about how to build SlideShare’s presence on social networking platforms and Rashmi asked, “Why don’t you do this for us? We haven’t had the bandwidth to give Facebook, Twitter, and the blog enough attention. You could do it.” So I did.

By posting updates, news, and links to interesting articles about presentation design and delivery, I developed a deeper sense of what the SlideShare community responded to. Across the board, public speakers and presenters, no matter what discipline they come from, simply want to be better. The content-creating community of SlideShare is a living, breathing entity that is constantly growing, improving, and learning from its members. They want to do everything they can to get their ideas conveyed accurately, so that they may be understood. They want to reach the widest audience possible and have their ideas influence people and businesses. And, conversely, the audience wants the presenter to do well. People want to learn and understand new ideas and concepts. They want to be inspired so that they themselves can do better.

This need and desire from the community to learn how to use SlideShare more completely, as well as create and deliver presentations, inspired the idea to create a book. Early in 2012, I interviewed Nancy Duarte about her firm’s new tool, Diagrammer. We began talking about the changing trends in presentation design and delivery. That conversation, along with Rashmi, Jon, and Amit’s full support, put wind in my sails for writing this book.

There are many talented writers in the US. But there was only one person who I knew had the skill and experience to collaborate with me on this project: Andrea Meyer. Andrea is a prolific writer for the likes of MIT, Harvard Business School, Cisco, and IBM. We met every week for months, on Pearl Street in Boulder, often at Kimbal Musk’s The Kitchen Next Door. We originally set out to create a handbook, a guide to using SlideShare. We quickly found that there is far more to using SlideShare, and presentations overall, than would be satisfied by a how-to guide.

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Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank the following people who made themselves available for interviews: Alex Osterwalder, Felice Frankel, Dean Meyers, Thierry de Baillon, Adam Tratt, Liz Ngonzi, Justin Fogarty, Anna Richter, Catherine Dold, Nikos Sarilakis, Jeremiah Owyang, Samantha Starmer, Scott Schwertly, Rand Fishkin, Beth Hayden, Koka Sexton, Jake Wengroff, Kevin Fisher, Marcy Phelps, Marcia J. Rodney, Ellen Naylor, Rachel Bates Wilfahrt, Joe Chernov, Janet Corral, Sebastian Majewski, Bill Scott, Jason Alba, Jesse Desjardins, Amber Case, Andrew Hyde, Bruce Gabrielle, Ef Rodriguez, and Tara Hunt.

We’d also like to thank Mark Frauenfelder, Baratunde Thurston, Nancy Duarte, Peter Morville, and Dan Pacheco, who generously shared their networks and made introductions for us early on. Thanks to Laurie Lamar for her brilliant insights on information design, and to Klaus Holzapfel, who built the book’s digital presence.

And for their help, generosity, and spirit of community, we’d like to thank Laurie Lamar, Beth Kanter, David Crandall, Jonathon Colman, Jose Briones, Amy Sample Ward, Christian de Neef, Todd Zaki Warfel, Abby Covert, Dave McClure, Mandy Jenkins, Rohit Bhargava, Steve Buttry, and Jim Long.

We’d also like to give a special thanks to our editor, Brian Sawyer, for his diligent editorial help as well as his production advice.

Finally, we’d like to thank the SlideShare teams in San Francisco and New Delhi, and especially Kevin Fisher, Ben Woodward, and Amit Sawhney, who reviewed specific chapters and gave us valuable feedback. And, of course, thanks to Rashmi, Amit, and Jon, who started it all.

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