Old School slide decks: a Kodak slide carousel tray (courtesy ehpien on Flickr CC)
For research into a topic, plus ideas and examples that can improve your own presentation visuals, it’s hard to beat SlideShare.
When a speaker says, “Give me your business card and I’ll send you my slides” after a presentation, I always think:
1) As soon as I give you a business card, I’ll bet that you’ll put me on your email blast list without even asking first, and
2) Why don’t you share your slide decks on SlideShare instead of hoarding knowledge and emailing it out to one person at a time?
I don’t share all of my speaker presentations on my SheilaS SlideShare account, but I do post when I think I can provide insights and value (and have permission from certain clients who may not want information shared that they’ve paid for.)
…. and yes, there is considerable SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value to having presentations out in public on the web. All of the text in presentation titles, descriptions and in the slides themselves is indexed by search engines.
People sometimes ask, “Don’t you worry about someone stealing your ideas?”
No.
Ideas are everywhere; any chucklehead can find them. The trick is applying ideas and concepts to specific organizations or problems; that is where the true value comes in, that’s what I’m paid for, and that’s what someone else can’t do like I can do, because they aren’t me.
Plus, more and more of my slides are simply an image, and I tell a story or give an example that goes with that image. No one who steals it is going to know the story, or tell it the way that I can.
Here’s my latest discovery while using SlideShare for tourism research – detailed information about outbound travel from China by Chinese tourists. The COTRI (China Outbound Tourism Research Institute) shares a lot on SlideShare, so if you want to learn how to connect with this exploding market of millions of travelers, you can start with the COTRI SlideShare account.
This is their latest presentation, in case you weren’t able to attend COTTM 2013 (the China Outbound Travel & Tourism Market) trade show in Beijing and hear it in person….
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