I'm an advisor to Slideshare, the world's largest sharing community for professionals. Today they launched Slideshare for Business, a new way for businesses to promote themselves with direct business results:
You may not know that 80% of Slideshare's members are business decision makers. With over 20M unique visitors per month, that's a lot of business people presenting themselves. The Slideshare team picked up on some of the patterns of promotion within their community and developed two new Slideshare Business products to make them more efficient and effective: AdShare and LeadShare.
I've been using both AdShare to promote my content and LeadShare to generate leads through my content for about two months now with great results. With AdShare, my presentations are the ad content, and are displayed according to how the community ranks their effectiveness by clicking through them.
Typically, B2B marketers produce "assets" like whitepapers, webinar recordings, presentations and other collateral. Then they make them available to sales prospects on a landing page which describes it, but you have to fill in a form with your contact information to get it. You can't engage with content or socialize around it to foster trust.
LeadShare inverts this lead generation model. You can request or require that a user fill in the lead gen form at the end, middle or front of the document or presentation. It is presented in the context of the community, but can also be extended to your site through embeds.
Businesses are engaging and fostering trust more than ever with Social Media, but its difficult to directly tie these activities to the Lead Generation that feeds the business. Advertising is seeing growth in new interactive formats with contextual relevancy, but are fighting an uphill battle against sensitized decision makers. For these two world to get along, incentives must be aligned for quality creative production and community participation.
I believe SlideShare for Business represents a new ad format and self-service network that can help Social Media drive direct and measurable business results. And I know Slideshare members will develop creative and compelling ways of using it I can't predict.
Coverage: Slideshare blog, TechCrunch, San Jose Mercury News, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Dave McClure, Mashable; and InternetNews quotes me:
"Services like Twitter are popular but they still lack the tools that drive actions and the kind of measurable business results that SlideShare has developed," he said.
