7 Ways Businesses Can Get More Social With SlideShare

Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy. She was recently elected to serve on the board of directors of WOMMA.

Online presentation website SlideShare is an important business network that ranks in the top 300 websites, with 30 million monthly viewers, and 80 million pageviews. Users upload presentations, Word and PDF files, tag them, and share them on other social media sites, or embed them in their blogs and company websites.

But SlideShare isn’t just a one-way process: The social functions in the site are giving companies the potential to connect with customers and clients in new ways, generating new business and enhancing their online image.

Here’s how businesses achieve social success using SlideShare.

For organizations of all sizes, presentations can communicate a company’s ethos far beyond the more traditional LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook routes alone. Presentations make a company more three-dimensional and add personality.

In May 2011 NASA launched its NASA Universe channel on SlideShare, which integrated presentations, documents and videos from NASA headquarters and field centers. In the announcement on the SlideShare blog, NASA social media manager Stephanie Schierholz said, “SlideShare provides us another great way to share our content in new ways and new places with the goal of inspiring and interesting people in the universe.”

Because presentations are generally about very specific topics, companies use SlideShare for inbound marketing, to generate traffic through clients’ and customers’ searches. By sharing SlideShare links, it’s possible to optimize searches by tagging presentations and using the SlideShare profile to link back to the company website.

IBM Expert Network is a set of channels that leverages the thought leadership of employees across the company to gain social media engagement. It showcases the latest thinking, research, inspiration videos and more.

We’ve all heard it: What gets measured gets funded. But tracking awareness metrics is one thing; measuring lead capture is something else entirely. Eloqua has an active and creative SlideShare channel – so creative, in fact, that SlideShare features Eloqua’s channel as an example of an effective Platinum page. Through Eloqua’s SlideShare Cloud Connector, the company automatically populates its demand generation database with profile information from anyone who completes a form on its SlideShare channel. It’s one of the ways companies are bringing together social media with demand generation.

Another thing that jumps out about the channel is its social network cross-pollination. The company highlights links to its Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube communities right under the channel description.

An increasing number of companies are using SlideShare to present financial, technical or other in-depth information that can be difficult to represent on their websites using more traditional tools, such as graphs and text. This enables businesses to connect with potential clients in a whole new way.

Pfizer uses SlideShare to post its financial reporting and other presentations, which allow interested parties to access information in a user-friendly format.

Brand management company 1000 Heads specializes in managing what others say about brands. The company uses SlideShare’s social tools and community section to spark conversations with users who comment on, embed or share presentations from their clients, which helps them to reach and engage whole new audiences.

If a webinar or conference presentation reached only a few thousand people in its original format, posting online through SlideShare can create a multiplier effect. Distilled‘s Tom Critchlow initially presented a webinar to a few thousand people, but after posting on SlideShare, received over 30,000 views.

Have you used SlideShare? Do you find it a visually pleasing and useful tool?

Occupy Facebook: Social Network for Protesters in the Works

Occupy Wall Street activists are developing a social network called The Global Square for the generation of protesters.

“We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists,” developer Ed Knutson told Wired.

Knutson is helping build the network, which will unite members of Occupy movements across the globe. As more of the physical encampments are evicted across the U.S., digital meeting places will be of increased importance, explains a November RoarMag blog post.

“In addition to the local squares, we now need a global square where people of all nations can come together as equals to participate in the coordination of collective actions and the formulation of common goals and aspirations. For this reason, we call upon the revolutionary whizkids of the world to unite and assist in the development of a new online platform – The Global Square – that combines the communicative functions of the existing social networks with the political functions of the assemblies to provide crucial new tools for the development of our global movement.”

The Global Square will include an interactive map of uprisings around the world, an easy search option to find movements near you, a Facebook-style news feed, calendars, debate forums, collaboration space, messaging and more. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, Wired reports that to become a member, you will need a sponsor to ensure you are trustworthy. The site is expected to launch in January.

This is not the first tech innovation we’ve seen spurred by the Occupy movement. OWS broadcaster Tim Pool is creating new reporting techniques, hackathons have united programmers and the Free Network Foundation brought free Wi-Fi to Zuccotti Park.

Established social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, are considered to have been at the center of revolutions across the world this year. However, members of the Occupy movement fear these networks would turn over private messages, when confronted by authorities.

In January, ousted Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak shut off the country’s Internet in fear of the power of social networks. Last week, a Massachusetts district attorney subpoenaed Twitter for private messages from the @OccupyBoston Twitter account.

Do you think The Global Square is filling a void for activists, or are the existing mainstream networks sufficient? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, The Whistling Monkey

Why Real-World Socializing Is the Next Big Thing for Social Media

Often, there is an ironic disconnect between your online and offline social networks. In other words, we’re “friends” with strangers on Facebook, and we “hangout” when we’re actually apart on Google+.

Facebook app Shaker attempts to transform the social network into a virtual bar. While buying someone a virtual beer is a poor substitute for the actual experience, Shaker is attempting something pretty interesting when it comes to meeting new people. By mashing up your social graph with your interest graph, Shaker connects you with new people you might actually become friends with in real-life.

But Shaker still feels like an awkward middle ground for social networking — a stopgap bridge between our online and offline selves. In other words, I’m not entirely convinced that I’ll ever really say, “I had a great night last night on Shaker.”

There’s no doubt that social networking has transformed the way we interact with friends and family, and has made the world a more open and connected place. There’s just one problem — social networking is not actually social.

From the Latin root socials, meaning “united, living with others,” the word social is firmly grounded in the physical world and implies face-to-face interaction. If you’re a social person, it means you like to spend time with other people. But this definition conflicts with today’s concept of social networking, in which we interact primarily with screens rather than with people.

Facebook doesn’t understand old school, face-to-face social interaction, and it never will because the concept goes against the company’s bottom line. The more time users spend with the computer screen, the more ads they encounter, and consequently the more money Facebook makes. While Facebook enables some real-world interactions, this practice is the exception, not the rule.

When Google+ launched Circles as a real-life interaction tool, it seemed to understand the problem, stating that the “subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our [current] online tools.” But what was Google’s solution? More nuanced online tools. This is a losing battle because there are no substitutes for real-world interaction.

So, how do we break away from our screens without losing the benefits of a digitally connected life? How do we bridge the gap between online and offline by becoming more connected with our real friends out in the real world? How do we make social networking actually social?

Two converging trends have the potential to socialize social networking: the explosion of mobile and the shift toward “future tense” sharing.

Mobile has done more than any other trend to drag social networking into the real world. No matter where we go, our smartphones help us to stay connected with friends and family. But “staying connected” is different than actually connecting face-to-face. Even industry leaders like Foursquare fall short when it comes to facilitating real-world interactions. The checkin was partly built on the myth of the serendipitous connection — the idea that when I check in somewhere, a nearby friend will decide to join me. In practice, this rarely happens. There are just too many hurdles, missed connections and passed opportunities.

While mobile represents the bridge between the online and offline worlds, mobile alone isn’t enough. It’s not simply a matter of web versus mobile; it’s a matter of past versus future. In the last decade, Facebook and other social networks have focused on mapping and documenting our existing relationships. The company’s preoccupation with the past is highlighted by its new Timeline feature. At the same time, however, Twitter and Foursquare emphasize what is happening right now.

The past and present of our lives are already established online — therefore, the next frontier in social networking is the future. “Future tense” social networking asks: Where do you want to go? Who do you want to meet? What do you want to buy? By sharing your plans, desires and aspirations, you enable real-world interactions. For example, when you push a checkin to the future, you shift the paradigm from “I’m here now” to “I’ll be there later.” You increase the likelihood of connection.

Likewise, “future tense” social networking has the potential to transform location-based marketing because users are directly expressing their intent. For example, imagine that a user broadcasts her plans to grab pizza at Home Slice. A competing pizza place could then offer a deal in an attempt to swipe Home Slice’s checkin. Then, Home Slice could upsell by offering the customer half-off a second pie. So it goes.

Marketing has always been about understanding a potential customer’s intent. When you understand intent, you can serve a more relevant ad at a time when that person is most likely to take action.

Understanding intent is just as beneficial for consumers as it is for businesses. Consider the travel industry: When a customer buys a plane ticket from Expedia, his intent is clearly to travel to a specific city on a specific day. Consequently, Expedia can present great hotel and rental car deals for that destination — and the payoff is big. According to Expedia’s 2011 third quarter report, only 9% of its worldwide revenue comes from booking airline tickets — the remaining comes from booking hotels, car rentals and other travel-related services.

The shift from present tense to future tense might seem trivial, but it will generate a huge shift. “Future tense” social networking catches people at a unique moment in the buying cycle. The consumer hasn’t entirely made up her mind about where to go or what she plans to buy, which means businesses can take an active role in the decision-making process. After all, you can’t change the past or the present, but you can change the future.

Ultimately, real-world socializing will win the day. Humans are social creatures hard-wired for interpersonal contact and companionship. It’s time to bridge the gap between our online and offline lives and make social networking actually social. Real life: Accept no substitutes.

 

ConnectYard Connects Students and Profs Via Text, Social Media

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: ConnectYard

Quick Pitch: A social media platform that connects students and professors through their preferred form of communication.

Genius Idea: A professor emails a student and it’s delivered in whatever form the student prefers, such as a text message or Twitter and Facebook post.

More students these days prefer interacting on mobile devices and social media sites over traditional forms of communication such as email. To help eliminate the communication barriers between students and their professors, institutions from Cornell University to Georgia State University are turning to a social platform called ConnectYard that allows them both to send and receive messages however they like.

If students prefer interacting through text messages or on Facebook and Twitter, they can send messages to their professors this way. In turn, professors can receive and send responses however they prefer – and typically, that’s through email, according to ConnectYard CEO Donald Doane.

“Faculty isn’t always keen on adopting new technology and many don’t want to encroach on the personal space of students on social networking sites,” Doane told Mashable. “ConnectYard allows students and professors to interact on the platforms they prefer to use. If a teacher cancels a class and sends an email to students, some students might choose to receive the message as a text or Facebook post instead.”

Students can also respond to messages on whatever platform they choose. If they are on Facebook and send an email to their professor about a class, the professor can receive it through email.

“We wanted to give students and faculty an easy way to reach each other and interact without having anyone change their communication habits,” Doane said. “We’ve had great success with it so far and more institutions are jumping on board.”

ConnectYard also integrates with other popular learning platforms such as Blackboard and Desire2Learn, so students and professors can post and respond to queries, and the site archives all interactions as a reference, regardless of where they originate.

In addition, if a student is reading an ebook, she can pose a question from their ereader and the professor can respond via email, It will then show up directly in the the student’s ebook notes on the device.

“ConnectYard is flexible in how it allows students and faculty members communicate,” Doane said. “Everyone prefers to communicate in different ways, so we want to make sure people can interact with others however they feel most comfortable — whether it’s just through email or through a high-tech device or social platform.”

Quepasa’s Latin social network has 80% upside, analyst says (QPSA, GOOG)

Social media technology company Quepasa Corporation ( QPSA , quote ) is attracting analyst attention as it positions itself to grow in the Latin American and Central American markets.

Rodman & Renshaw recently initiated coverage on the company, assigning it a "Market Outperform / Speculative Risk" rating and a $7.00 price target. The stock has been trading below $5.00 since August 2011, and closed at $3.89 on December 5, so this would entail a significant 80% in upside potential. Analyst Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw says Quepasa has had a volatile year due to market gyrations, a strategic acquisition and the excitement over social media investing. He sees Quepasa as "attractively positioned" for expansion, with a substantially larger user base and new products in the mobile space, but warns that the company is in a highly competitive industry. Quepasa is a survivor of the first dot-com boom and bust, having established itself in 1997 as a web applications developer. In 2008, it repositioned itself as a Latino social network, and now claims 35 million members worldwide. As the Florida-based company's name implies, it is strongest in Spanish-speaking countries. Orkut, the social network owned by Google ( GOOG , quote ), is the leader in Brazil, with 39 million of its global total of 66 million users in that key emerging market. Last month, QPSA merged with Insider Guides, Inc., owner of myYearbook.com. Quepasa plans to use myYearbook's technology to expedite mobile development. Quepasa also publishes "Wonderful City Rio," a Facebook game made entirely in Brazil that attracts about 120,000 players per day, which gives it a social gaming edge as well.