Every time we turn on the news lately, it seems we are confronted by one tremendous challenge after another: health care reform, finance regulations, real estate reform. Somewhere in the middle of all this noise, issues regarding the environment are still fighting for our attention and making a case that the circumstances involving the air we breathe and the water we drink should be our top priorities.

Although so-called “green” issues have taken a backseat to economic woes lately, the two really go hand-in-hand. After all, aren’t we all more frugal in our homes and at work than we may have been only a year ago. Ultimately, this is probably a good thing, but it can pose challenges at your next presentation.

When it comes to keeping your presentation green, you have two things to gain: First of all, you are doing the right thing and being a good steward of your world by not wasting energy and resources just because you’ve simply been too lazy to research alternatives. Secondly, you are racking up the cool points. Lets face it, green is in fashion and the presenter with the smallest carbon footprint will find that they are basking in a verdant glow of hip and happening at their next face-to-face. Plus, greening up your presentation doesn’t have to get too complicated. With just a few tweaks and a little common sense, your next presentation will be hugging trees!

Unplugged
This is one of the most obvious solutions for “greening” your next pitch. The fact is, many of us already rely too much on our PowerPoint and not enough on engaging our audience. By limiting the amount of time you devote to your computer and projector you will save energy and preserve your batteries, bulbs and gear. Chances are you’ll also put yourself in the position to become a much better, more personal presenter.

Employ Soy
One place that a green presentation can quickly get messy is with the creation of marketing collateral. Presentation folders, envelopes, propaganda of all kinds need to be printed and printing can be hazardous to the earth’s health. Luckily, many printers nowadays can offer environmentally-friendly soy-based inks. They look great and they give you bragging rights!

Less is More
If you have a lot of materials you’d like to leave your audience with, take the time to really seek out all the alternatives available to you. Nowadays most printers have a variety of styles and materials available that will allow you to create a complex, compelling presentation folder full of goodies without sacrificing style points or greenness.

Stick ‘em Up
One last tip for keeping your printing cheap and green: Consider using stickers instead of printing on folders and envelopes. Stickers can look really great and can allow you to recycle old collateral materials by relabeling instead of throwing them away and re-printing your next project.

Brag About It
While greening up your presentation may cost more in the short run, you can translate that cost into free promotion of your company as a cutting-edge, green firm. Make sure all of your materials are clearly labeled as recyclable and earth-friendly. By wearing your green proudly on your sleeve, you can generate the other kind of green by promoting your business as conscientious, progressive and ahead of the pack!

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.

With LeadShare, some users have expressed curiosity about how the lead generation forms works on documents embedded on blogs. Here are examples to help you with this. Three cases are possible:

Case 1: Lead Generation form after the 1st page in the document; form is COMPULSORY for further viewing (users cannot skip it) : Use scroll bar or forward/back buttons to view this.

Case 2: Lead Generation form after the 1st page in the document; form is NOT COMPULSORY for further viewing (users can skip it) : Use scroll bar or forward/back buttons to view this.

Case 3: Lead Generation form after the last page in the document : Use scroll bar or forward/back buttons to view this.

With LeadShare, some users have expressed curiosity about how the lead generation forms works on blog embeds. Here are examples to help you with this. Three cases are possible:

Case 1: Lead Generation form after the 3rd slide in the presentation; form is COMPULSORY for further viewing (users cannot skip it) : Use forward/back buttons to view this.

Case 2: Lead Generation form after the 3rd slide in the presentation; form is NOT COMPULSORY for further viewing (users can skip it) : Use forward/back buttons to view this.

Case 3: Lead Generation form after the last slide in the presentation : Use forward/back buttons to view this.

For some time, we have observed that many of you use SlideShare for your business, from a one-person consulting shop to small company to large corporation. Our site surveys confirm this, most of you use SlideShare for your business, in one way or the other.

Today, we are launching a new section of the site : SlideShare Business for all of you who SlideShare for your business.

Carmine Gallo had a quick interview with our World’s Best Presentation Contest winner Dan Roam. Dan is amazingly insightful in his answers so we wanted to publish it for the SlideShare community. Enjoy!

Q: What was the purpose of explaining health care with stick figures and napkins?

A: Like many people, I became concerned about the direction the health care debate had taken in this country. The anger, anxiety, and frustration we saw at the town halls told me that we lacked a common understanding of the issues actually on the table; nobody had drawn the health care “big picture” to explain what anyone was talking about. The result is chaos. I decided to draw that picture, and to draw it as simply as possible in order to establish a clear baseline for deeper discussions. I learned long ago that when helping executives clarify their ideas, nothing is more powerful than a simple hand-drawn sketch. The less polished, the better; the more “human”, the better. When introducing a new idea, people react much better to a work-in-progress than a polished presentation.

Q: This is hugely different than the vast majority of business presentations and I’m sure you don’t recommend that everyone copy this template. However, what is the common principle that applies to anyone’s presentation?

A: On the contrary, I DO recommend that everyone copy this approach. If we really want our audience to engage and understand, we must create presentations that invite our audiences in. Simple, hand-drawn pictures draw people in. Preaching to our audience through bullet points or overwhelming them with mounds of undifferentiated data does not. The standard PowerPoint approach actually closes down discussion. If we really want to make our message stand out, we have to make it look human.
What is the key takeaway/learning from Back of the Napkin?

Three quarters of the neurons in our brain that process incoming sensory information are focused on vision. While most people in business think they can’t draw (they can) or that they’re “not visual” (they are), we can all get infinitely better at discovering, developing, and sharing new ideas by taking advantage of our innate “visual thinking” system: our eyes, our minds-eye, and our ability to draw simple shapes.

Q: Dan, your presentation looks like it’s created in PowerPoint. So, PowerPoint is not evil? Your thoughts?

A: For good or for bad, PowerPoint has become the standard tool for communication. Because of its ubiquity and the ease with which PowerPoint makes lazy thinking look “professional”, it’s easy to malign PowerPoint as evil. But PowerPoint is just a tool. It’s a hammer. We don’t blame the hammer if the building falls down; we blame the builder. The same applies here. As a simple framework for telling a linear story, PowerPoint is fine. We get in trouble when we let all the unnecessary polishing tools in the menus do the our thinking for us.

Q: Finally, all the winners are highly visual. Does this represent the new trend in PowerPoint design?

A: Using visuals isn’t just a trend in PowerPoint design; using pictures to think, work, and share is the dominant business communication trend of our time, period. Which makes sense: in a globalized business world where we likely don’t speak the same first language as our colleagues and where we face problems of such complexity that they defy words, pictures are the answer.

Its 3 years of SlideShare! 3 years! Hard to believe. From an idea in Jon’s head, it has grown to a vibrant place where millions of people hang out. Last month, we reached a total of 20 million monthly visitors. We beat all sorts of records - the most visitors in a day, the most presentations & documents uploaded in a day, the most registrations.

The daily life of a startup is so hectic. There is always a new feature, a new bug, a new idea to implement. But we wanted to take this day to stop for a moment and thank all of you. We feel lucky to work on SlideShare, lucky that you come to visit, to upload your slides, to check out others.

We have an exciting year ahead of us. Lots of new things up our sleeve.

We are also interesting in hearing - what would like us to do? What new things would you like see on SlideShare?

Thousands of presentations are uploaded to SlideShare everyday. But some catch your eye from the moment they get uploaded. Tha’s the case with the winning presentation for this year. I saw Dan Roam’s Healthcare napkins shared on Twitter, the day it was uploaded, and watched as it spread virally. No surprise that it won the contest (full results here).

The second prize was won by Sheltering Wings by Sarah Cullem,

, the story of an orphanage in the small West African country of Burkina Faso. I confess, I had not even heard of this country before this presentation.

The third prize was won by Feels Bad on the Back by Mohamad Faried who volunteers at an Indonesian kidney foundation.

One special announcement this year: the Web 2.0 Expo New York has invited the winner of the World’s Best Presentation contest to speak at their upcoming conference. We are thrilled to announce this partnership and hope this helps bring the value of great presentations to a business audience.

This year’s contest was sponsored by Adobe Acrobat 9. We want to thank them for their support. The contest also included a prize for best Acrobat 9 presentation. This prize was won by Avalok’s Creative Acrobatics from Avalok Sastri. The runner up for Acrobat presentations is Success Consulting Portfolio.

We also had several category prizes for Technology, Business, Creative/Offbeat, Education and About Me. The five category prizes were won by

24 Reasons why Twitter Sucks! in Technology,

Eco-nomics, The hidden costs of consumption in Business in Business,

Simplicity in Creative/Offbeat

A crime so monstrous in Education

Who is this guy in About Me.

Thanks for everyone who participated. We wish we could send you all prizes. You made visiting SlideShare fun and interesting. We will be back next year!

Update: ReadWriteWeb just posted an article about the contest results here.

There has been a lot going on at SlideShare recently.

Portrait version of SlideShare Playlist: We introduced the SlideShare playlist a few weeks ago . But it was limited to landscape mode. Today, we added support for the portrait version of the playlist. Many of you with blogs/websites with less wide columns will find this useful. Check it out below

| Get your SlideShare Playlist

New Helpdesk: Our customer support channels were not keeping pace with the growth of SlideShare. We are in the process of shifting to a new customer support helpdesk called Zendesk which should help us communicate better with you. Zendesk is a well designed customer support portal and integrates forums & FAQs into customer support in a seamless way. The migration will be complete in a week or so.

The best part about Zendesk is the concept of “Known Issues” where we will post any problems we are already aware of. Please check that before posting problems. You might find answer to your problem. And please be patient with us during this transition. We think that we will be able to be much more effective in solving problems now that we have this system in place.

New FAQs: We are also shifting our FAQs to Zendesk. Check it out here.

New Privacy Policy: Finally, we have done a long overdue update to our privacy policy. It has a lot more details about how we can use your data including sections about related issues such as security and phishing. These questions had come up earlier and users had pointed out that our Privacy Policy (which we had written right before we launched!) was not comprehensive. We care about your privacy and with this updated policy have covered any issues that you might be concerned about. Check it out here.