Our Slideshare Snafu and the Power of Slideshare
Posted on 05. Sep, 2011 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, content marketing, content marketing world, content strategy, SlideShare, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
As we dawn on opening night for Content Marketing World, I felt it worth sharing our big Slideshare snafu.
If you are not familiar with Slideshare, it’s like the “YouTube for PowerPoint presentations”. I’ve been using Slideshare since 2008, uploading about 100 presentations, and have seen more than 100,000 views. After I speak at an event, I usually upload the presentation to my Slideshare account. From there attendees and non-attendees alike gain access to the presentation (and share it via social media), in addition to the fact that Slideshare presentations show up VERY well in search rankings.
The Slideshare Snafu
On Wednesday of last week, we started to upload the conference presentations. Ultimately, we were going to password protect them for just Content Marketing World attendees, but we decided (wrongly) to get them all on Slideshare first and then set the privacy settings after they were all uploaded.
We started by uploading 10 presentations. Two hours after the first presentation was uploaded, here were the results.
- Over 1,000 views in less than two hours
- Three speaker complaint emails
We were all in shock. Without any promotion at all, and in just minutes, people starting sharing the content around the web.
Of course, big mistake on our part and a valuable lesson. As soon as the first speaker email came in, we updated the settings…but it clearly shows the power of content distribution in the right channels.
According to our 2011 B2B Content Marketing Study (to be released soon – here’s the 2010 content marketing study), only 21% of business marketers distribute their content through Slideshare. What a lost opportunity? Heck, in just a month, we’ve had more than 6,700 views of the Content Marketing Playbook on Slideshare alone. Those are people that most likely are not engaging with us in our other channels.
Some Slideshare ideas:
- Upload your executive presentations
- Take long white papers and make graphically-pleasing eBooks
- Take your research and make a chart presentation
- Upload company newsletters
These are just a few ideas, but the lesson is that it’s hard to generate results for great content without the right distribution tools.
Good luck!
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