If you haven’t heard of Slideshare and Scribd, it’s time. Everyone knows about YouTube – the tagline is “Broadcast Yourself”. But not all businesses have produced meaningful videos that they are ready to distribute. However, I would argue that just about every B2B business has power points and documents they share with clients and prospects. And if your business has a capabilities brief, marketing collatoral, sales presentation, sales demonstration, or other supporting documentation along the marketing and sales cycle, you should consider posting them in slideshare and scribd.
Slideshare
Their tagline is “Present Yourself”, and it is essentially “YouTube” but instead of posting videos users post power point presentations. Like Youtube, there is a player to scroll through presentations, analytics to see how many folks have looked at your presentations you’ve posted, and the ability to easily embed the presentation just about anywhere. Here’s a presentation I’ve uploaded into this blog entry to give you a look.
Scribd
Same concept, but for .pdf documents and word documents. Scribd also allows users to see how many people have viewed the documents you have posted.
Lima Consulting Group Capabilities Brief
I really like how both websites allow users to search other similar materials. The automated suggestions are relevant, and presented in easy to understand formats.
Both of these websites have tight integration with facebook and linkedin. As a matter of fact, you can post your presentations to your linkedin profile. When you update your presentations you can publish the update via twitter and through the status update feature in facebook and linkedin. There is a connection you can setup to link facebook, twitter and linked so that you can make updates in one which will feed the other social networking websites. You can also post a wordpress link within your linked profile, but we’ll cover that in a separate blog posting.
Next time your company publishes a document you want to share with your target segment, consider posting them to slideshare and scribd.
