Book Review: Present Yourself - Using SlideShare To Grow Your Business 40
benrothke writes "SlideShareis a free web 2.0 based slide hosting service where users can upload presentation-based files. Launched in October 2006, it's considered to be similar to YouTube, but for slideshows. It was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it has since expanded to also become a host of a large number of slides which are uploaded merely to entertain. SlideShare gets an estimated 58 million unique visitors a month and has about 16 million registered users. With such a strong user base, authors Kit Seeborg and Andrea Meyer write in Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business how SlideShare users can use the site (including other similar collaborative sites such as Prezi and Scribd) to present their story to a worldwide audience. Given that visual presentations are the new language of business, understanding how to maximize their potential can be a valuable asset for the entrepreneur, job seeker and everyone in between." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.
The truth is a book on SlideShare alone would need no more than 15 pages (20 pages if you include the Pro edition). How difficult is it to upload a PowerPoint? As an aside, there is a huge market for publishing freely available content. Check out Emereo Publisherson Amazon. They have mastered the art of taking free Wikipedia content and charging for it. Enough digression – in this valuable book – the authors show not only how to use the product, but how to maximize its use. | Present Yourself - Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business | |
| author | Kit Seeborg and Andrea Meye |
| pages | 224 |
| publisher | OReilly Media |
| rating | 9/10 |
| reviewer | Ben Rothke |
| ISBN | 978-1-4493-4236-4 |
| summary | Great resource for maximizing the use of SlideShare and your online presentation presence |
Throughout the book, the authors quote liberally from science and research on the power of visualization. With that lies the inherent power of SlideShare, as humans like images and think more efficiently when they use them. The authors quote a study which shows that when carrying out routine office tasks, if the data is displayed more visually (such as through visual maps), individuals are 17% more productive and need to use 20% fewer mental resources. As to the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words; the authors show that it has a basis in biological fact.
The book is worth it just for the sage advice in the quote at the beginning of chapter 3 where Nancy Duarte, author of slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations states about presentations, that "they didn't come to your presentation to see you. They came to find out what you can do for them. Success means giving them a reason for taking their time, providing content that resonates, and ensures it's clear what they are to do". Using Duarte's call to arms with the guidance in the book can hopefully start a meaningful change in how data is presented.
As to the presentation itself, the book notes that the presenter of today has a huge challenge in keeping the audience engaged. Anyone who has presently recently knows that many, often a majority of the audience will be distracted by their smartphones, Twitter, Facebook, Angry Birds and more. With that, presenters must put in extra effort to compete for the mindshare of a distracted audience. The book shows you how to overcome such obstacles and suggests that one way to win more audience attention is to include engaging visual slides with your presentation and show them intermittently instead of in parallel with your talk.
Throughout the book, it is clear that the authors are passionate about the topic and it lists many resources and uses to make presentation much more effective. The book has numerous real-world examples of such users. One is Adam Tratt of Haiku Deck; a free presentation app for the iPad that makes presentations simple, beautiful, and fun.
Another example is that of Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group, a research and advisory firm whose reports consistently rank in the top 100 most viewed documents on SlideShare. The amazing thing about their research, which competing firms charge thousands of dollars for, is that it is all free on SlideShare. The example also shows how they use SlideShare Pro for the secure creation of the reports. They view this model of open research as a core asset that has served the firm well, establishing its credibility and reputation as a trusted resource
While the book has business in its title, it still has significant relevance for end-users, specifically in chapter 7. There it details how you can use SlideShare to further your career and find a job. This is crucial regardless of your profession and industry, in that while the traditional resume is still alive and well, the ability to place your experience on-line opens up new horizons. A full professional presence requires both a paper resume and an online presence.
The chapter notes that a comprehensive online presence, especially with a compete profile on LinkedIn, is forty times more likely to receive job opportunities. The authors note that even if a person is not a presenter, there are things they can do on SlideShare to highlight themselves; including a presentation that serves as a visual resume of their career, a portfolio presentation that displays their creative work and more. Even for those who are not speakers, the authors recommend that the serious job searcher consider public speaking as part of their career strategy,
For those that want to take a look, the first chapter of the book is available here. Not surprisingly, it is on SlideShare.
For those that want to learn everything about SlideShare, from the mundane of adding a SlideShare widget to your website, sharing your presentation across social platforms, sharing your content, collaboration, finding a more rewarding job and much more, Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business is a great resource.
Reviewed by Ben Rothke
You can purchase Present Yourself - Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Blocked, like everything else (Score:4, Funny)
Websense kills it with the "Personal Storage and Backup" category, meaning that the unemployed, the hipster, and the non-Fortune1000 company employees can access it. Good business model.
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Blame your IT department. Websense has a very wide array of categories they filter based on and it's up to your IT guys to select the appropriate filter categories. Maybe your IT guys felt that storing information outside of the company's servers was a risk they were not willing to entertain.
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Yep, it falls into the category of "X but on the internet" in this case: Powerpoint. Which was already on the internet. Provided by the single biggest website. For free.
Thankfully here is slashdot to hawk a book that hawks a no-name service to provide what we don't need, and really don't want.
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There's a reason "news for nerds stuff that matters" is no longer the slogan. Dice.com is just hawking front page stories to the highest bidder in an attempt to make any of their money back.
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Look, it only needs to work on 1% of the slashdot userbase for it to be an effective advertisement. Seeing as steve here appears to be a regular user, he is, in fact, the sucker.
DESLIDE, BEEOTCHES (Score:2)
if your stuff is worth a shit, I'll jack that right into my cerebral cortex
http://deslide.clusterfake.net/ [clusterfake.net]
Ugh... (Score:5, Informative)
"SlideShareis a free web 2.0
Stopped reading there. Looks like a Slashvertisement for something worthless.
ACs thread to the rescue (Score:1)
- "SlideShareis" seems like a strange name for a product
- "free web" seems redundant
- "web 2.0"...brb...back...had to vomit. Someone else take over!
Er...make a PowerPoint and upload it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like it would be a short book. Step 1: Make a PowerPoint presentation. Step 2: Fricken' upload it to a site designed to accept PowerPoint presentations.
Why did this make SlashDot (once a home of IT gurus and programmers) again?
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When samzenpus gets offered a blowjob, everything is news for nerds.
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In Korea, only old people use Web 2.0.
Another one? (Score:1)
So it's all web 2.0, but like all of these things you lose control of your data, and you're information is how they're making money.
Sorry, no.
Holy slashvertisement for Slideshare (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you kidding me Dice? Piss off. This is just distasteful.
I find presentation softwas (Score:2)
The way most people use it, all
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:5, Funny)
I hope they did the environmentally responsible thing and printed this book on toilet paper.
Been saying that about US currency... (Score:2)
What size roll do you think is right... um... give me the $1000 roll.
So you know your money is always worth a ....
So, basically, it's powerpoint + youtube? (Score:2)
I don't want to live on this planet any more.
slashdot book reviews (Score:2)
The average rating of the last 5 book reviews is 8.4 out of 10. I think we need to see a review of something bad for a change.
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