Blog Archives
What’s Your Slideshare Strategy?
Slideshare continues to evolve as one of my favorite social sharing and networking sites around.
With more than 25 million visitors each month, it should come as no surprise that Slideshare can be utilized in a variety of ways for general professional networking, to showcase ideas, gain competitor insight, talent recruitment, advocacy, develop new business leads, create shareable training, drive personal branding and support other outreach.
The site also continues to evolve and adapt to the needs of businesses and organizations alike with announcements this year around branded channels, video sharing capabilities and business products such as AdShare and LeadShare. Here’s some additional breakdown:
Interestingly enough, 80% of Slideshare’s members are qualified as decision makers – people you should be connecting with on a regular basis. For good reason, the site integrates with other professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and makes it easy as pie to share and embed content across the Web.
If you or your business are not currently utilizing Slideshare in one way or another, you’re missing out on a big opportunity. Take time to think about your company’s communications channels. How can Slideshare be utilized to help amplify your mission or news, improve networking or general efficiency around your training processes?
For those on the nonprofit front, Beth Kanter posted this excellent presentation around 9 Ways Networked Nonprofits Use Slideshare.
Feel free to share your own tips or insight on how to make the most of Slideshare below.
5 Reasons Why Lists Help Connect Your Message
Everyone loves a list. Admit it, you know you do.
So what is it exactly that makes lists, whether in the form of blog posts, articles in e-newsletters or elsewhere so appealing?
I’m a list fanatic myself so here’s my take on why lists help make your messages stick with readers.
1. Lists Are Digestible
It’s easy to get intimidated when you see a blog post that has more than 4-5 paragraphs unless it’s a topic that strikes an exact chord with your interests or is specific to whatever you’re searching (case in point – Tamar Weinberg’s Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2009 masterpiece). ‘Top 5″ or “Top 10″ lists give you immediate insight into what you’re getting yourself into. Psychologically, you already know there is an end to the list and thus, are naturally more inclined to take a chance on reading the content.
2. Lists Are Easy On The Eyes
Seems superficial but building off of point #1, numbered lists are much easier on the eyes than a list of 10 bullet points. Humans are methodical. We like things to be in order. Take the work off of your readers by listing content in order of significance, removing reader anticipation of having to assess and analyze a series of randomly made points.
3. Lists Are Sharable
Particularly in social media world, everyone loves to share. Lists make for easy content to share that will help ensure you connect with the right audience. In essence, you’re creating the perfect recipe for re-tweetable, diggable, forward-worthy content. Tamar harps this point when discussing strong content submission ideas for social news sites in her book, The New Community Rules: Marketing On The Social Web.
4. Lists Prompt Further Insight
Particularly with blog posts, lists open an avenue for discussion as readers naturally have additional ideas or perspective about what’s worthy of being included within the topic at hand.
5. Lists Demonstrate Thought Leadership
Lists are a great opportunity to step out of your comfort zone and compile your thoughts about a particular topic into a structured format. Assuming others agree with your insight, you’re providing sticky content that is going to resonate with your key audience.
Go ahead, feel free to add to the list or try pulling together your own topical list for your next blog post or company e-newsletter.
-Scott
Using Twitter for Crowdsourcing
I’ve previously posted about how you can use YouTube as a crowdsourcing tool to get feedback on video concepts and creative. LinkedIn Answers is of course another great resource to pose questions for feedback or alternatively, position you or someone in your company as a thought leader and expert resource for a particular industry.
A new Twitter application called TweetBrain allows you to take advantage of crowdsourcing as well. It’s a pretty simple application. Sign in with your Twitter account info and you’ll be able to look at a stream of current questions and answers. Alternatively, you can use the search function to drill down on specific topics. Again, a great option for thought leadership positioning and also a potential way to build your sphere of Twifluence.
Be sure to check out Jack Humphrey’s post for a nice video intro to using the site.
-Scott
