This is a great visual presentation of the social media landscape. (please watch this is full screen mode) This comes from Banner, a London based agency.

The ongoing World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009 has category prizes as well. One of the categories is “About Me” and we noticed a bunch of interesting entries here. Some that tickled our editorial team are embedded below.

Something to note- each of these entries is interesting for a different reason…

1) This is a social media resume. If you are wondering, what that is supposed to mean, take a look..

2) This is a sequel to a presentation that won a nomination in the WBPC 2008 last year. The story continues here. If you want to see the first part to this, go here.

The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009 is hotting up. Its been a couple of weeks since this went live and we have 1547 entries from 1021 participants and 3432 votes have been cast (as on 18th August 5:00 AM PST). Its great to see this kind of enthusiasm in the community.

Off course not all the entries are top notch (thats expected). But one entry that did catch our attention for its humorous overtone is embedded below. This is a take on what people should do to win the SlideShare contest. Thanks avalok for this cool slideshow. This had the slideshare team in splits as well…

Just a reminder- this year, besides the votes polled, we are also looking at the social media receptivity for each contest entry - no of tweets, shares etc. So you’ll need to keep the score ticking on that front as well.

We’d like to point out this creative style of presentation design. It’s called the “back of the napkin” and comes from Dan Roam, who is a SlideShare user, and an accomplished author & visual thinker. Check out Dan’s slideshare profile here. Dan has actually uploaded a 4 part series of “back of the napkin” presos on the American Healthcare System (see the 4 part playlist shared below using the presentation pack).

| Get your Presentation Pack

The Applicant blog has a great post listing 7 SlideShare presentations for job seekers. Head here to check out the post…

If you want to rank high for searches on your name which social media channel should you use? This blogpost by Duane “DJ” Sprague describes a test of different channels for search visibility for his name. The experiment was over a 72 hour period.

SlideShare appears to be more effective at creating instant and higher search visibility than YouTube. I have also taken note that with 13 advertising videos on YouTube vs. 15 advertising slide presentations on SlideShare, the videos received 114 downloads in a week compared to 1,556 slide downloads, and the videos had a 3 day head start.

Read more

If you are looking to rank high for your name, our suggestion is to fill out your SlideShare profile completely. Make sure to use your full name (that you are trying to rank high in searches for).

The first contest we ever hosted, the first World’s Best Presentation Contest 2007 was an important landmark for SlideShare.  We discovered gems like Shift Happens and Meet Henry. The second year (2008), we built on that further and quadrupled the number of entries and votes. This year, for World’s Best Presentation Contest 2009, our focus is on presentations as social media objects that get shared online and passed around.

We have asked judges who are experts on presentations & social media to join us in finding the best presentation for 2009. Guy Kawasaki (gkawasaki on SlideShare) has written a lot about presentations and needs no introduction to this community. David Armano, author of Logic & Emotion blog (darmano on SlideShare) is one of the most popular people on SlideShare - his visual communication style is brilliant. Finally, Padmasree Warrior CTO of Cisco (padmasree on SlideShare) has taken communication by a company to a whole another level. Through her talks, tweets and presentations, she has helped us all think about collaboration.

So please enter your presentations into this year’s contest. Give us the best you can create. First prize is MacBook Pro, second is Amazon Kindle while third prize is iPhone 3G. Go here to learn more and full list of prizes.

As in previous years, everyone on SlideShare can vote. But we have something new this year. To choose the finalists, we will go beyond votes and look at tweets and shares on social networks. So, ask your friends / contacts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to check out your entry and vote / tweet / share it. This will add a whole new dimension to this year’s contest. The hashtag for the contest is #bestpreso.

Another new this year - if you use the SlideShare app on our partners services - LinkedIN, Facebook & XING, you can get votes from your friends & colleagues on those networks. If your SlideShare.net account is synched with our LinkedIn, Facebook & XING apps, your SlideShare contest entries will show up there with a strong call for viewers on those networks to vote.

We want to thank our sponsors Adobe Acrobat for helping us bring this contest to you. They recently released Acrobat 9 which also helps you create rich presentations and portfolios. They are also sponsoring a special prize (HP TouchSmart laptop) for the best presentation / portfolio created with Acrobat 9. Judges for this category are social media experts: Julie Hansen, COO of Business Insider, Scott Belsky, founder & CEO of Behance, Harry McCracken editor of Technologizer. For the duration of the contest, you can upload A9 presentations directly to SlideShare. Go here to learn more about the A9 prize.

Best of luck with your entries. The entire SlideShare team is waiting to see your work.

HubSpotTV (from HubSpot- the leading Internet Marketing company) has a podcast interview with Marta Kagan. Marta is a long time SlideShare user and her presentation on Social media is a viral hit. She published the original presentation about a year back (it has a somewhat provocative title “What the … is Social Media?”) and this continues to evoke heated debate/comments besides lots of views, embeds, downloads etc. Two weeks back, Marta published its annual sequel titled “What the … is Social Media? One year later)… this presentation is flying as well.

Here is the video from the HubSpot blog

The discussion also focuses on using SlideShare as a marketing platform. Thanks HubSpot & Marta for this.