Setup a Branded Channel for Your Docs with SlideShare

YouTube and Flickr have used branded channels for years to allow businesses to create easy sharing of their videos and photos.  But for some reason this has never translated into the corporate world and the piles of documents, PowerPoint presentations and PDFs that every company inevitably has.  Today, SlideShare rolled out branded channels that aim to do just that.  Businesses of any size can now create free branded pages where they can store documents that they want to share with the world.  Even more important, users can create their own pages around specific topics and include your docs in the mix.  This means the whitepaper that you wrote about Bald Eagle Habitats can now show up on pages where environmentalists and Bald Eagle enthusiasts will be looking.  This is a much better way than just posting the document on your corporate or personal website and crossing your fingers that someday somebody will read it.  You can even create webinars of any of your docs by adding audio right from within the application.

GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE
As with all apps we supply you with a sample usage case that will hopefully help you generate some ideas of how your business could be using this product.

• Law Firm – Let’s say you have a local law firm, a 10-person shop, and you’ve just done a PowerPoint presentation and whitepaper on tort reform and how it affects people in the state of California.  Instead of simply posting that on your website where a user might stumble upon it, open it up, print it and move on, why not post it to SlideShare on a branded page.  The law firm could setup a branded channel on SlideShare, post these two documents to it and maybe even create a themed channel on Tort Reform.  The law firm could find five other documents also pertaining to it and you’ve suddenly created a one-stop repository for quality content on Tort Reform.  Two days later a user types Tort Reform into the search listing, opens up your themed channel page and likes the flow and quality of your documents.  They go to your channel page, post a link to it on their blog, tweet about it and suddenly your  documents that used to get viewed by five people now have the eyeballs of hundreds.  All because you uploaded two documents and took 10 minutes to set it up.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Mixed with SlideShare’s Leadshare program, you have the ability to share all types of documents in a very viral way, while gaining valuable insight into who is clicking on what and what types of content are most popular.  While there are other places to post your documents online and make them public, this appears to be the most efficient way to make them social and viral.

• Cost: Free
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