SlideShare: Learning another social media tool

The challenge of mastering social media is that you never get there. You always have to learn something new.

My newest social-networking platform is SlideShare. This is a place to post presentations on PowerPoint and other slide-show programs. When I was training at the American Press Institute, people frequently asked for my slideshows. They were big and I seldom emailed them when people requested the slides for seminars where I traveled. For API seminars at our headquarters in Reston, Va., we burned slides and handouts to CD’s for par participants and they seemed to appreciate it.

So when I learned about SlideShare, I decided I should start posting my slides there. I presumed the slides would be meaningful only to people who have attended my presentations, because the slides are really secondary to the discussion.

What has surprised me is how many people look at the slides alone, without having participated in the seminar or webinar that would give them context.

My Twitter presentations especially have attracted more attention than I would have expected. A Twitter for Dummies show that I developed for last week’s Edge Business Magazine workshop was featured on the SlideShare home page and has been viewed more than 500 times in a week. That show was geared for general business use. Another slide show on Twitter, geared for newsroom leaders, has been viewed 266 times since I posted it nearly a month ago.

I have eight other slide shows, four developed for API journalism ethics webinars and two for API seminars, telling about our Gazette Communications reorganization to develop a new information content organization, and two versions on liveblogging, orginally developed for a February webinar for the Canadian Newspaper Association and then updated this week for ASNE). Altogether my slide shows have been viewed more than 1,000 times.

How SlideShare differs from other social networks is that we rarely actually connect. I usually don’t know who’s viewing my slides (except a couple of Germans who tweeted about them). Facebook and LinkedIn generally connect me electronically with people who are actual friends. On Twitter, I connect frequently with people I don’t actually know. Sometimes we actually develop a relationship, so that when we meet at a local tweetup or a journalism conference, we feel like we know each other at least a little.

One friend in journalism training who does much better slide shows than I do has seen my SlideShare presentations and offered to give me some pointers (I’ll take him up on the offer when things slow down a little). But for hundreds of others who have shared my slides, my SlideShare experience is largely anonymous. Not that you could learn as much about me from my slides as you can from my tweets.