As you know, SlideShare is one of the best ways for you to get the most out of your presentations. With SlideShare you can make connections, increase the reach of your presentations, view presentations you didn’t have the opportunity to attend, and market your work on the Internet utilizing inventive, interactive solutions.

Discover all the ways in which you can utilize it to market your previous projects, or to promote your current work.

There are a number of ways to use these tools, but there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, learning by trial and error! Here are 10 great ways to make SlideShare work for you.

Start here, and then let your imagination run wild!

1. Get Down and Up Load
SlideShare can be used with a number of different file types. Not only can you upload your PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare, it can also interact with files from OpenOffice, Adobe .pdf files and more!

2. Share and Share Alike
SlideShare will allow you to share your work with millions of clients and colleagues across the Internet. It can also be a powerful, private distribution tool, allowing you to share presentations discreetly on intranets and networks as well as on private sites.

3. All Access Pass
SlideShare makes organizing easy. Use it to download, flag, search and categorize your own work and 1000’s of other online presentations.

4. SlideCAST
By combining SlideShare’s tools with your podcasts you can increase the reach of your audio content and better target your listening audience.

5. Sound Off
Add audio to your slides to create webinars, slide cartoons – even music video style presentations!

6. Meet and Greet
The social applications of SlideShare allow you to make new friends with similar interests as well as new professional contacts.

7. Join the Movement
On SlideShare, you can join groups and establish yourself as an expert in your field, or curate collections of presentations and start a group of your own!

8. Catch Up
In addition to using SlideShare to promote your own work, it can also be a great portal for discovering and viewing countless presentations by some of the best minds in your field.

9. Get Connected
Customize your SlideShare widgets and add them to emails, social sites, and blogs where you can drive traffic to your presentations.

10. Develop
SlideShare allows programmers and developers to customize applications and create presentation mashups!

About the Author: Scott Schwertly is an epic storyteller.  Today, he owns and operates Ethos3 Communications, a Nashville, TN-based presentation boutique providing professional presentation design and training for national and international clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to branded individuals like Guy Kawasaki.

He may live in Nashville, TN with his wife and three dogs, but he calls San Diego home – the place of his beloved San Diego Chargers.  Scott has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Harding University.

Like many others on the web, we write and communicate with our members in a fluid and spontaneous manner using blogs, email, and twitter. Sometimes, in that spontaneity, one can make a hasty and regrettable decision. On March 31st, we (SlideShare) made a mistake which impacted many of you. It was an April Fool’s prank and was not intended to offend and cause negative impact. Many of you found it funny and told us so. But many others did not. Please accept our whole-hearted apologies.

In this post, I would like to go beyond apologies and share what lessons we have learned.

But first, some background on how the prank came to be. Celebrating April Fools with a joke is something of a Silicon Valley tradition. Last year, we made a hoax announcement that SlideShare would not allow bullets in presentations anymore since Edward Tufte had joined our board. Many of you found this amusing and this year, we wanted to play an April Fool’s joke again.

We had been racking our brains for past two weeks, but unable to come up with a good joke. It was March 31st and we had to come up with something fast. We came up with what seemed like a simple, cute idea- just add two zeroes to presentation views, and send out an email telling people about it, asking them to tweet it. We feel a close connection with our users, like they are dear friends, and our prank reflected that - something you might do to a dear friend and then say “Ha!, its April 1st!”

The prank had repercussions far beyond we had imagined.

We set the email to be sent out at 5.00 AM PST on April 1st. Around 5.15 AM PST, my cofounder Amit, who is based in New Delhi called me saying a few twitter reactions to email indicated that prank was having impact that we had not anticipated. I woke up groggily and we decided to immediately stop emails. I called up a sleepy SlideShare_Dan who stopped the email server. By this time, many emails had already queued up and app 5-6% of our users had already been sent the email. The damage had been done.

Some quick lessons.
1) Don’t pull off a prank without thinking through its repercussions clearly and thoroughly. (We simply did not spend enough time thinking this through, and there were many unintended aspects). We overlooked both first and second order effects.

2) If you play an April Fool’s joke, make sure it’s apparent in the first 30 seconds that it is a joke (as many of our users pointed out, the message itself should have indicated it was a prank. For example, a link leading to a page with “Its an April Fools’ joke”). Or maybe if we had added three more zeroes (five overall), it would have been clear it was a joke (or bug). In retrospect, that seems such an obvious idea. Duh! But this was not clear to me on March 31st.

3) Statistics are sacred. (don’t mess with them, even in a prank!)

I won’t go on. There are many smart social media experts (who are members of SlideShare) and spoke up with great ideas about how we could have handled it better. I want to tell our users who voiced an opinion - we hear you loudly and clearly. We will take your views into account.

Some long-term lessons
We know people use SlideShare in business-centric ways. But we were surprised by how many people were using it for client work. They were the most upset, as they had conveyed the numbers to their clients. A special word of apology to anyone who was impacted in this manner.

It’s been a sobering moment inside SlideShare. From a small website, we have grown and people are using us in all sort of business-centric ways. We know that, but we need to keep this in mind more. Many of you pointed out on, SlideShare is not a YouTube, which is for entertainment. It’s more like a LinkedIn, for professionals to use.

So here is what we are doing. We are reaching out to some of our toughest critics on blogs / twitter directly. We will try to understand better how they are using SlideShare, and also post some email interviews with users on our blog.

We are also putting together a survey of our users so that we can understand better just how people are using SlideShare in their business. I think this will be a good thing for the SlideShare team to have a better understanding of our users, and keep the different uses in mind as we build features or do community things.

Most of all, we will not repeat such a joke ever again.

If you have suggestions, comments, please reach out to us – post a comment or email us. We are listening.

Rashmi Sinha
CEO, SlideShare Inc

Update Nov 10th: The feature has been restored. You should be able to replace a file if you need to now.

We’ve temporarily turned off the ability to replace or re-upload a presentation file. We’ll be doing some bug testing and fixing a few problems over the weekend before we re-enable it.

You will still be able to edit other details (privacy, title, tags, etc) of a slideshow.

We’ve been getting intermittent reports over the past couple of weeks about users not being able to access the SlideShare home page or that the stylesheet doesn’t load (”all text on the left”) among other things.

We try to respond to all feedback we receive on SlideShare but obviously a few fall through the cracks here and there. I’ve put together a few pointers to help us get to the problem quicker (and also help improve your experience of SlideShare)
Continue reading »

Today is Blog Action Day, where thousands of bloggers around the world unite to discuss a single issue. The purpose is to change the conversation on the web and focus global audiences on that issue. This year’s topic is poverty.

We encourage you to see what difference you could make. Presentations are a great medium for getting your ideas across. Create simple, powerful presentations and help spread awareness. We’ve spotlighted presentations on poverty on the SlideShare homepage. Please tag your presentations with “blogactionday” or “bad08″ so we can find and feature them.

You could also join the Blog Action Day Event on SlideShare and contribute to the discussion. Cheers to our users Nancy Poh and Oliver Ding for doing a great job initiating discussions and collecting presentations.

Blog Action Day 2008

Here are some presentations to inform and inspire you: Continue reading »

Since the startonomics conference is using SlideShare, its really easy to put all the presentations from the conference into one. Take a look below. If you run a conference, then make a Presentation pack for your conference. Go to the widgets page on SlideShare [http://www.slideshare.net/widgets] to get started.

| Get your Presentation Pack

A few companies have used SlideShare to put up shows about their products and services or about themselves. In many cases these are beginning to show up in web search results too, and are a valuable first point of contact with customers.

Considering that, we thought it would be a good idea to share this list of tips and best practices to market your company effectively using SlideShare.
Continue reading »

We wanted to share some info and updates about the World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008.

Blog Badges: To help you promote your contest entries, check out these “Vote for me” badges that you can put on your blog/website. Copy its embed code from below the voting widget and embed in your blog. Clicking these badges will take viewers directly to your entry to vote on. Examples below….

World’s Best Presentation Contest

World’s Best Presentation Contest

Max 10 entries allowed: As per contest rules, only ten entries are allowed per user. Once you have reached this number, you will not be able to enter more contest slideshows.

Private slideshows not allowed: For a presentation to be eligible for the contest, it has to be uploaded publicly to SlideShare. Private ones are not allowed.

Copyright/Ownership of content: Please make sure you are only submitting material that you own the copyright for. Learn more about our copyright policy here.

Bogus entries/spurious votes: We have implemented a fairly comprehensive system to detect bogus entries, spurious votes, orchestrated up-voting or down-voting etc, and are going to keep a vigil. If so required, appropriate action will be taken to preserve the impartiality of the contest.

We seek your co-operation in making the World’s Best Presentation Contest an even bigger success than last year.