A Look At The Event Industry’s Obsession With Slideshare

The event industry – and honestly, enterprise in general – seems to have something of an unhealthy obsession with a little service known as Slideshare. Marketed as the world’s largest community for the sharing of presentations, the site allows pretty much anyone to design and upload a slideshow, which can then be shared across the web (or at a presentation). It’s basically PowerPoint set up to run with web 2.0.

On the surface, the reason for this fascination seems pretty clear. Slideshare allows speakers to readily display facts, figures, and charts to the audience. They allow for something of a second ‘layer’ to a speech or presentation; an easy way of summing up the points the presenter is trying to make to the audience. In other words, they allow for a simple, visual presentation method.

A well-made slideshow can make a keynote just as certainly as a poorly-conceived one can break it. Of course, that’s probably something of which most of you are already aware. At any rate, we’re getting off track.

Let’s refocus – we’re here to talk about slideshare.

Is It Really Just About Slideshows?

The fact that slideshare allows for the creation of slideshows is actually secondary to what makes it truly valuable: its marketing potential. See, Slideshare is incredibly popular, boasting over 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million monthly pageviews. That’s a ton of hits and clicks, especially if a presentation you’ve posted ends up getting featured on the front page.

The amount of exposure from a good slideshare presentation can give any event management firm or brand a positively insane volume of additional traffic – and many of those clicks are potential leads.

What that means is that a savvy event planner can easily drum up both excitement and awareness for both their brand and for future events by posting presentation slides to the site. Some professionals might even draw more attention to their job, bringing in new hires or prospective clients by displaying a thorough knowledge of event management.

The Learning Potential Of Slideshare

In addition to being a great marketing tool, Slideshare can also prove invaluable if you’re trying to learn about a particular industry or profession – including, of course, event management.

I suspect that on some level, Slideshare also appeals to our current sensibilities as readers. We’re not exactly interested in slogging through pages of boring, dry copy in order to absorb new ideas or find new information. Slideshare presentations (at least…those which are properly designed) require no such drudgery. Information is presented in a clean, crisp, and easy-to-digest fashion; it’s an intensely visual mode of communication which allows us to learn without having to exert a great deal of effort in doing so. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course.

Enterprise in general – and the event industry in particular – seems to have developed something of an obsession with Slideshare. Given the power of Slideshare as both a marketing and an educational tool tool, this addiction is anything but curious. It’s basically Powerpoint for Web 2.0, complete with a whole host of additional features that pretty much anyone – event management professional or no – can’t help but find useful.