UPDATE (0215 CST): We’re back up. Fully loaded.

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

Why did we build channels? Over the course of 2009, we saw an influx of businesses and other organizations join SlideShare. Many have established strong presences on SlideShare, become a part of the community, sharing presentations and whitepapers. After talking to them, we realized that businesses want richer ways to connect with the community on SlideShare, which include a more customized look and feel which fits the rest of their web presence. We started testing out the channels programs with a few partners late last year. The initial reaction has been great – we have some real successes. Now, we are opening the channels program to more companies and organizations.

For the curious, this is the next step in rolling out the SlideShare business model. We believe that social media is changing the way that businesses reach customers. With the growth of social networks like Twitter and Facebook, companies are realizing they need to go where the users are. This trend has definitely reached SlideShare as well. Now, we are thinking of innovative ways that businesses can engage with their users on SlideShare that go beyond traditional advertising. A branded channel allows a business to reach and engage with SlideShare community in a much deeper manner. On the other hand, for the community, it provides more interesting content.

Channels also complement the two business services we launched last year: AdShare and LeadShare. AdShare lets you get targeted views of your content while LeadShare lets you capture customer leads through your content.

With the launch of channels, businesses can now run integrated campaigns on SlideShare. For example, a company could have a branded channel, get more targeted views of their content (using AdShare) and capture customer leads (using LeadShare). You not only get engagement with social media, but also fulfill concrete business goals.

We hope you enjoy browsing the channels. Our editorial team will be highlighting the best among the channels regularly.

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

Prayers, support and condolences have poured in from our readers. Many of them provide a lot of useful information, so that help can reach the needy unabated.

We at SlideShare share the feelings of our community and too join in support, in praying for victims and their family. We make an appeal to all, to help in any which way they can.

Apparently the kittens are the experts on Onsite SEO…

The puppies too are the SEO gurus and the masters of link building.

We’re very sorry about this and are working to fix it ASAP. In the meantime I’m manually crediting people’s accounts. If your account hasn’t been credited yet, please contact us via http://www.slideshare.net/business/feedback

Best,
Daniel

—Update—

This has been fixed. However, if you still have any issues, please still use the feedback form.

The winners are:

1st Prize:
‘Calling For The Real Santa’ by abhishekshah

2nd Prize:
‘Happy Holiday’ by vili48

3rd Prize:
‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ by doina

Congratulations to all the prize winners! A big thanx to all the people who participated in the contest.

P.S: We received a few complaints about vote rigging; we have taken every possible step to ensure that the final vote-counts were fair and based on legitimate votes.

Monday 00:45 AM PST: Server maintenance done and over. All systems back to normal … let us know if you are facing some problems.

Its a cold wintery morning here and the Delhi HadoopHackday has just kicked off at the SlideShare office. This is a hacking festival and the participants include SlideShare engineers, interns doing projects with us, engineering students from Delhi’s engineering colleges, developers from other Delhi based software companies & startups. All teams get 24 hours to build something using distributed computing technologies like hadoop, mapreduce et al. And we have 10 teams participating.

Head to the wiki for more details.