We just unwrapped a new section of the site called Channels. If you go there, you will see channels or communities with content from Microsoft, Adobe, Razorfish and EPA among others.

SlideShare channels are branded spaces for businesses and brands. They provide an extra bit of oomph for companies with great content.

This means, you have a new way to find great content on Slideshare. If you are looking to feel inspired, then go to the Channels section to find interesting channels. The channels range in variety of content and organizations. Some example ones are listed below

• Microsoft has a sponsored community focused on parenting topics with content from Microsoft and from users (done in partnership with Federated Media)
• Ogilvy has setup a concept channel for Pharma
• Razorfish Marketing has a set of great presentations from Razorfish.
• Adobe Acrobat has a community encouraging uploads of Adobe Acrobat 9 (done in partnership with Federated Media)
• Pew Internet has shared a lot of their research reports
• Whitehouse is sharing almost 1000 presentations and documents

Coverage: ReadWriteWeb: SlideShare launches Custom Channels for Business

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Many of you have been asking us – what is the best way to use LeadShare? Well, it depends on your business problem, but there are some simple things you can do to get more qualified leads with LeadShare

1) My content does the qualification
Look at your content – does it good job of qualifying the users, i.e., is it focused enough that if a viewer has reached the end of the presentation, then he / she is likely to be qualified. The people for whom this method works have spent a lot of time thinking about their content and progression of the slides so that by the time people view their lead form and fill it out, it could mean only one thing (that they are qualified and interested).

2) Turn off download
If you are getting many unqualified qualified leads, then try turning off leads coming through download (users can still download the file, they just won’t get the lead form). A lot of times, users are downloading because they have some general interest in the presentation/topic, but no specific interest in your product / service.

3) Add Custom Questions
Something else you can try is to add more custom questions to the form. Ask what the relevant question is for your business. While we suggest not asking too many questions, it might make sense to add in a relevant question or two to get more qualified leads.

4) Try different calls to action
Pay attention to what the call to action on the lead form is. Its probably the most important determinant to who fills out the form. Try different calls to action to see what performs best.

Finally, be experimental. Try different options. You can try creating different campaigns with different

One of the new mantras of social media is that you need to create content to connect with people. But what does that really mean? Should you start hiring bloggers? Or should you start creating videos? presentations? What type of content? This presentation from Barbra Gago below answers that question.

View more presentations from Barbra Gago.

It never ceases to amaze me the different ways people dream up of using SlideShare. This Bulgarian chess club has uploaded almost 40 presentations.

Each of the presentations depicts a set of chess moves. Browse through the one below.

We are pleased to announce an extension to our Slideshare for Business products. During the last three months, Slideshare users have been collecting leads through their presentations and documents with LeadShare — within the world’s largest professional sharing community.

But we heard from a many of you – that you want capture leads on your site / blog. Now with LeadShare for your Domain, you can generate unlimited leads by embedding the player in your website, without per-lead, per-form field costs. This is a great fit for:

* Blogs and Social Media campaigns that drive direct business results
* Upgrading your Microsites, Webinar archives and Landing Pages with LeadShare

For further information, see this presentation and contact us anytime.

The SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009 is now live. Check out the presentation below for a quick walk through the ruling presentation trends in 2009. The zeitgeist includes some data points about presentations, presentationware, presenters, usage trends etc that would be of interest to just about everyone. We have also sprinkled it with some fun facts & trivia. Our engineering team spent considerable time mining our database so as to come up with these numbers.

The SlideShare Zeitgeist 2009 is being published for open and unrestrained usage. Feel free to quote these figures in your works, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes (we’d appreciate an attribution though).

The Zeitgeist also included community voting for the most inspiring presenters on SlideShare. This activity was ongoing for the last three weeks. The following SlideShare users have been nominated at the top of the charts. Congrats to them for achieving this feat (and also for inspiring the SlideShare community).

1. Christian Heilmann
2. John Resig
3. Dave McClure

Here’s wishing goodbye to 2009. And wishes for a smashing and successful 2010!

On behalf of the entire SlideShare team,

- Rashmi Sinha
Cofounder & CEO

A few days ago, I announced a new section of our blog focusing on social media for businesses. Today I would like to introduce our first blogger for this section – Ross Mayfield – longtime SlideShare advisor, Founder and President of SocialText, the first wiki company. Ross has a deep understanding of social media and writes, speaks and blogs about these topics regularly. He blogs at http://ross.typepad.com/.

As we grown the social media for business section on this blog, it will be great to have Ross blogging here and sharing his insights about this topic.

As SlideShare has grown, it has attracted more people. Not surprisingly, it has also attracted some spammers. On looking closer into it, we realize that there are different types of spam.

One is the drive-by spammer who uploads some spammy content and leaves. Its relatively easy to identify this and take the content down.

Harder to detect and remove is “social spam”. For example, a user following thousands of users in the hope of getting a few users to follow back, and therefore getting more distribution of their content. Or users who favorite a lot of content hoping to get people to visit their pages. Or who comments on a lot of presentations with the same hope.

We have started identifying circles of such users who engage in “social spam”. While this is very common on larger sites like Twitter, we want to kill it in to root while its early days on SlideShare.

The community Zeitgeist has attracted its own share of social spam. We have algorithmically detected patterns where a few users are nominating specific users hundreds of times. Closer analysis shows its probably the same person getting nominated / doing the nomination. We have put algorithms into place that will remove all such nominations from the system. If we find evidence that these same people continue trying to spam the Zeitgeist (either by making the nominations, or if you are the person who is getting nominated in this way), then we will ban the account.

Its perfectly ok to ask friends to vote, its not ok to login as another user (or ask another person) to vote hundreds of times. Our algorithms will detect voting fraud – anyone either casting votes like this, or getting such votes will be banned from the Zeitgeist. The goal of the Zeitgeist is to discover people whose content is genuinely popular among a large group of users. We will be doing everything we can to make sure to find genuinely popular users, not those who are manipulating votes.

Update: Our engineers have continued uncovering spam vote trends and removing those votes from the system. These will soon be reflected on the Zeitgeist page itself.