The ridiculous reach of Slideshare

I'm always banging on about Slideshare.net to anyone who'll listen - I think it's the great underrated social network, the secret weapon of communication. And people do listen - whether it's librarians on presentation skills or social media courses, or academics on web 2.0 / edtech courses, people are amazed at the reach Slideshare can provide. An example I like to give is of a presentation I created a couple of years back called The Time For Libraries Is Now - it's essentially pro-library propaganda packaged up in such a way that non-librarians will hopefully look at it. I've only given that presentation once to a room full of people, but it's been viewed around 70,000 times online - that's the equivalent of my having presented at Wembley Stadium! It's more or less the same amount of effort, for hundreds of times the audience and reach, and that makes Slideshare invaluable. People LOVE to share presentations, they tweet links to them, they talk about them on Facebook, they embed them on their own blogs and sites - and they view them a lot more readily than they'll read an article or a blogpost. It's all about packaging up a message for maximum impact; I've said before on this blog, that if I have something really important to say, I'll say it with slides.  Here's my Slideshare profile. Anyhow, Slideshare have just started emailing users with updates on how their decks are doing. This week I got this:

What struck me (apart from the fact that the Tweets / FB stats are wrong for some reason) is the sheer number of views per week - for things I've already done, and don't update or even regularly add to. Around 2 thousand views a week! This blog gets around 2,500 views a week (unless I actually write a blog post in a given week, in which case hopefully it goes up a bit...) and that's with an archive of 100s of posts for Google to find - Slideshare only has about 25 of my presentations on and yet that many people are receiving the messages I've put out there. (Plus, only four of my blogposts have had over 10,000 views, let alone 50 or 70,000.)

So, information professionals with something to say - make a nice slidedeck and get it on Slideshare. Libraries with key messages for users and potential users - by all means use all the usual channels, but use Slideshare as well! Got some new facilities? Make a slide deck about it, full of nice pictures of those facilities, and embed it on your library homepage. Got some new courses coming up? Create a PowerPoint with what the courses are, why they'll benefit the users, and some quotes from previously satisfied customers - stick it on Slideshare and embed it on your bookings page. Teaching information skills? Put the PowerPoint on Slideshare afterwards so your students can refer back to it.

In terms of getting your message to stick, and generally making slide decks which are nice enough to get shared a lot on Slideshare (and perhaps picked up and featured on their homepage, which guarentees a huge amount of exposure), here's some tips I've previously posted on here - on a slidedeck of course!

Good presentations matter from Ned Potter

And if you're interested and haven't seen it, here's the Time For Libraries Is Now deck I mentioned at the top of the piece.

The time for Libraries is NOW from Ned Potter

Digital Marketing Toolkit workshop, 21st May, Edinburgh

Next month I'm running a workshop on marketing information services using new technologies. It's a course I really enjoy teaching - during the full-day we discuss marketing with video, mobile, online publishing, geolocation (Foursquare), actual real-life useful things to do with QR Codes, social media... The emphasis as always is on talking not just about why they're relevant, but what actual next-steps you might take towards using them.

The course is being put on by UKeIG - full details can be found on their website.

Here's some pariticpant feedback from last time we ran it:

• Really useful, great delivery. Thanks!
• Brilliant workshop, well done!
• Perfect; taught me more about things I was using and also some new
• Excellent day
• Very informative, paced well
• Hugely useful
• Thought it was a great overview, got a lot from it .

So, I hope to you see some of you there!

Repeat after me: host content externally, embed content locally

Reblogged from the Library Marketing Toolkit Modern library websites now have ALL KINDS of content. Where there used to be lots of text and a few images, there's now much more dynamic content. We've got presentations, videos, audio, even embedded documents. This opens up a great opportunity to reach more and varied people.

It is possible to host all this stuff on your own website. But why do that when you can host them externally, and just embed them locally? It will save you an enormous amount of bandwidth, but more importantly, it will make your content infinitely more discoverable. We can't rely on people going right to the Library wesbite; we have to show up in their Google searches too.

As we all know, a lot of people don't know what libraries can do these days. If we host our content elsewhere on the internet, we're going to the people rather than relying on them guessing that the library might be the one to help. We're showing up in their searches. We're appearing on the platforms they frequent anyway. We're boosting our reputation among other libraries.

If you host a video on YouTube it will get views from people browsing that platform, as well as the views it will get embedded in your library website. The same applies for images which, if they're magnificent Special Collections images for example, you could put on Flickr in their own group, and embed them in the Library website (and why not set a up a Tumblr blog or a Pinterest board for them while you're at it?).

If you have Prezi or Slideshare presentations these can be picked up and featured by the hosting sites, leading to an exponentially increased audience. The same goes for PDFs too - host them on Issuu.com (like the new case studies for this website) or Scribd.com and they look good, get a lot more use (because people know what they're getting without having to open a file) and could become featured documents.

The Twitter for research PDF I recently uploaded to Scribd, to my organisation's account, was seen by around 3,000 people in its first two weeks of publication, because Scribd featured it on their homepage. So it was very useful locally, because putting on Scribd meant we could embed it locally making it more useable for our staff and students. But it was also useful internationally because it helped our institution reach a large audience, as a provider of useful guidance in an emerging area.

And what about Library news - why write it on the library website itself when you can host it on a blog and embed the RSS feed on your own site? Basically anything you think of can be hosted externally, embedded locally. What this means is you are AMPLIFYING your content and increasing discoverability - essentially, the work you put into your resources is going to be more richly rewarded.

So, repeat after me! Host externally, embed locally

6 alternatives to Google Reader, sorted by need

Google Reader, like iGoogle and other stuff we find useful but which doesn't fulfill Google's own criteria for usefulness, is for the scrapheap. It'll be turned off on July 1st - but don't wait till then to find something new, move on immediately and throw yourself into a new relationship!

What do you want out of a RSS subscriptions service? Here are 6 alternatives to Reader, sorted by need:

• I'm already bored with this article and just want something well put together and easy to use Look no further than Feedly. When you start using Feedly you'll immediately think that Google Reader looked outdated and bit rubbs anyway. Feedly takes literally seconds to access your old Google Reader feeds and then you're away - plus there's free Android and iOS apps for it too.
• I just want something that looks and feels exactly like Google Reader In which case let me introduce to Old Reader. It was made a while ago when Reader lost some functionality, to look like Reader used to look.
• I am a Mac person, I want something especially for me Newsrack may be the one - it works with Google Reader (you can sync with it for now, and import your feeds before Reader goes) but it works completely alone too. It'll cost you though, it's a paid-for app.
• I want something that can do more than just replace Google ReaderNetvibes can replace Google Reader AND iGoogle and do other stuff besides. It's relatively straightforward to import your Reader feeds too.
• I want something with a self-contradicting name Hello Newisfree! Looking forward to some free news, can't wait. Oh... okay. Premium.
• I want to approach things in a completely different way I personally don't use Google Reader anymore, because I trust my network on Twitter to surface what is important. If a blog post or news item is significant, or controversial, or just really well written, it WILL come to my attention on Twitter. So rather than resubscribing to a load of blogs via a new service, you could take time to make sure you follow some really good sharers on Twitter, and just take a more zen approach to finding good things to read... Plus if you do miss something, that's okay. .

Still have needs not met by any of the above? Check out the Online Journalism Blog's fabulous Google doc listing, at the current count, 50 way to subscribe to feeds.

- thewikiman

Twitter for Researchers guide

At my institution we're really stepping up our support for researchers, and I've been doing a lot of stuff around the Web 2.0 end of the spectrum. I'm running a suit of workshops called Becoming a Networked Researcher, and I've been into departments to give taster presentations like this one:

We've also finally completed a guide to using Twitter for Researchers. It's more a Twitter for Researchers actually, rather than the process of academic research itself (although that is possible). I've hosted it on Scribd in order to embed it on our web pages, and it got picked up and featured on Scribd's homepage so that helped boost the number of views it has had, which is huge, relatively speaking - around three-and-a-half-thousand. Plenty of those have been from York researchers, which is great - they've given us a lot of positive feedback and ReTweets.

The guide took a surprisingly long time to do - the difference between knowing stuff and actually writing an ideal version of it down in a document never ceases to disappoint me... Adding examples took a while too. I couldn't decide between very brief of very comprehensive - in the end I decided somewhere between the two, keeping it as short as possible but including a LOT of information. The idea is, if they want more, they can come to the Twitter workshop as part of the Becoming a Networked Researcher suite.

Anyhow, here it is - feel free to use stuff from it, with attribution:

Twitter for research by University of York Information

There'll be some more University of York Library stuff on the blog shortly, around Digital Literacy, videos etc!

- thewikiman