Five most awesome things I fondly recall about my summer internship at SlideShare

by Guest Author on October 16, 2012

Aakriti GuptaEditor’s note: Here at SlideShare we value the terrific interns that pass through our hallways every year.

Among them May through July of 2012 was Aakriti Gupta, a computer science student who shared recollections of her experience with us here.

Here are the five most awesome things I fondly recall about my summer internship at SlideShare:

1. I’m in!
SlideShare had been acquired by LinkedIn only a few days back and this was visible in the office.

I was introduced to the entire team, most of them wearing their LinkedIn tshirts. I was nervous on the first day but they turned out to be a totally amiable and excited bunch of people.

2. Mentors

I worked with the backend team. Akash, Shishir and Arpit were my team and mentors.

During the first couple of days a lot of new words were thrown at me. Shishir and Akash carefully explained how SlideShare functions as a team and how the backend of the product is laid out. Honestly, I could hardly make sense of all the things but now I realise these are some of the most important things I picked up.

SlideShare has 55 people and doesn’t have a formal internship program in place. Yet, they were very prepared for the interns. The interview process was smooth and quick. A couple of detailed interviews and all was set.

A project was discussed, planned and goals were laid out. They are very careful about understanding a student’s experience and expectations. The best thing about their mentorship is that they perfectly balance “let-her-figure-it-out-herself” and “lets-work-on-it-with-her”.

3. Buzzwords at the lunch table, not!

Their purpose changes all together once you have the SlideShare team together, either at the lunch table or on a Friday evening! You bring up one of the buzzwords to the lunch table and you’ll be sure trigger one of our geeks.

You laugh here, admire each other’s food, share it (maybe), pull each other’s leg but don’t speak of code! The lunch table is also where they give you a warm welcome. Even if you’re a newcomer, they won’t spare you – not from exercises to break the build with your commit, and not from their jokes.

4. DevelopHer Hackday

LinkedIn and SlideShare often have hackdays. One that they organized together – DevelopHer, happened at the end of June. DevelopHer was a women’s hackday, running parallel in Mountain View and Delhi.


This was my first time for 2 things: the first hackday I participated in and the first time I met so many hacker women together! My team mate, Mansi, who traveled all the way from Mumbai, brought with her an awesome hack idea. We started a bit late but by the next morning we had our hack ready.

The brainstorming, the excitement, staying up all night, the final bug fix, the generous supply from the kitchen – it was an unforgettable experience.

5. Eee – o – dee: The lessons I take back

Working in a team: I learnt how working alone on a project, remotely, and working in a team, on-site, are different. I learnt to share the progress of my project with my team. They always had great inputs to give and at the right time.

It is important the way you put forward your research, progress and ideas. The daily morning SCRUM was what set the day productive.

An LGTM: I have worked on a couple of other summer projects, but here I understood what it takes for the team to do several deployments a day – speed, testing, code quality and some serious R & D. The final ‘LGTM’ or ‘Ship it!’ on your code review is your trophy!

They are a bunch of passionate developers and designers, friendly, content and very welcoming. I left after a surprise cake and a short goodbye note.

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How Marketo Uses Slideshare for Inbound Marketing and Lead Generation – SlideShare Case Study

by Guest Author on October 9, 2012

Editor’s note: Jason Miller is the Social Media Strategist & Content Marketing Evangelist at Marketo. In this guest post, Jason shares how Marketo includes SlideShare in their content marketing strategy.

Jason MillerThe rise of visual content marketing is forcing marketers everywhere to re-evaluate their overall strategy. No longer can a marketing professional rely solely on white papers and blog posts to get their message to prospective buyers and customers. It’s now vital to include a visual element across all marketing campaigns. Marketo is a big advocate of visual content marketing and SlideShare is an essential part of our overall content strategy.

Throughout 2012 Marketo has had great success using SlideShare as a channel to promote our content. Working with Column Five Media, we created a presentation called How to Build a Better Inbound Marketing Machine. In just over four weeks our presentation had over 133K views and hundreds of shares across the socialsphere.

A few months later, we launched a second custom SlideShare deck using the same formula called Visual Content Marketing and it has achieved very similar results as it has just crossed the 105K views mark. Additionally, both SlideShare presentations rank number one above our competitors for the keywords each focuses on.

So how did we do it?
Now this of course is not an exact science, but having the following elements in place to promote and build awareness around your SlideShare presentation will give it a much better chance of increasing views and shares.

  1. Base your presentation on a topic you are an expert on – We here at Marketo are experts in Marketing Automation, but we also pride ourselves in being leaders in the world of inbound marketing and content marketing as they go hand in hand and play a major supporting role in a successful marketing automation strategy.
  2. Make it a part of something bigger – Our SlideShare presentation is a part of a much larger content initiative. At Marketo, we build our editorial calendar around monthly themes and then put together the content pieces to support that theme. Including but not limited to, SlideShare decks, white papers, blog posts, email campaigns, and infographics.
  3. Take it on the road – We present each of our SlideShare presentations at company meetings, user groups, social meetups, industry conferences and webinars.
  4. Use both paid and earned media in your promotion strategy – As our Inbound Marketing SlideShare deck points out, a marketing strategy that includes elements of both inbound and outbound marketing is vital for spreading your marketing message far beyond your initial reach.
  5. Work with a partner who understands your goals. If you are planning on creating content for SlideShare with a partner, make sure that your goals are aligned and that you clearly state the objectives well in advance.


The Results: With a bit of careful planning and cross functional alignment of your goals, the results are tremendous. Here are the highlights.

Marketo lead gen results

Pulling leads directly from SlideShare
Marketo integrates with SlideShare forms so that each of the downloads listed above sync directly into Marketo. We even have the option to trigger alerts to our sales development team when certain keywords are typed into the comment section of the download form within SlideShare. This strategy turns SlideShare into a lead generation machine that is completely automated.

Want a SlideShare Network for your organization? Contact the SlideShare enterprise sales team.

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Presentations are part of award-winning strategy – Mark Johnson brings home the BE2 gold

by Kit Seeborg on October 3, 2012

There have been the Bloggies and the Vloggies, the Emmys and the Oscars, but have you thought of submitting your presentations for global social media awards? That’s what SlideShare community member Mark Johnson FAIA did, and brought home two coveted BE2 awards.

Mark Johnson, FAIABE2 is a social media advocacy organization for the built environment. Founded in 2008 as Be2Camp, BE2 held the world’s first barcamp style event for the construction industry in London. Since then BE2 has organized over 15 barcamp styled events, as well as BE2Talks showcasing thought leaders in the built environment. BE2Awards are currently the only social media awards for the built environment.

BE2Awards are global, and voting is open to the public. We were very excited to learn that Mark received not one, but two BE2 awards for incorporating SlideShare presentations into his social media content strategy. We’ve written about Mark’s approach to social media and presentation content. Now his reach has increased exponentially, thanks to the BE2 community.

Here’s what BE2Awards had to say about Mark’s winning submission for Best AEC PR/Marketing Campaign:

“…(recognizes) the pioneering social media marketing initiatives he completed in 2012 for Formica Group, a global brand in the AEC Industry. His work and collaboration is documented in the presentation ‘Social Media Marketing for the AEC Industry’ at SlideShare.net. This case study will be featured in Business to Business Marketing Management: A Global Perspective, a college textbook by Jim Blythe and Alan Zimmerman, to be released in early 2013.”

and for Best Education and Learning Project:

“…his presentations on SlideShare leverage his years of experience as a designer and marketer to present informative and inspiring case studies and how-to lessons. Void of hype or speculation, Mark provides real world examples of social media at work. Many of his presentations are replicable; they serve as reproducable plans for the AEC professional who desires to maximize online time and effort.”

Congratulations, Mark, and thanks for inspiring the SlideShare community!

Have you won an award for your use of presentations? We’d love to hear about it – please leave a comment below.

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3 clever ways to get more mileage out of your content with SlideShare

by Guest Author on September 27, 2012

Editor’s note: we’re pleased to welcome Gregory Ciotti as a guest author for the SlideShare blog. Gregory manages content and inbound marketing for Help Scout, and regularly blogs about content marketing and psychology at Sparring Mind.

When it comes to successful content marketing in 2012 (and beyond), visuals have and will continue to play a pivotal role in creating a successful and memorable content strategy. While creating slideshow based content for your company’s blog is certainly a smart tactic, there are a few other really clever ways to get more mileage out of your content by using the SlideShare platform.

Today I’m going to break down 3 simple tactics that you can utilize to step up your content strategy with minimal extra legwork. Let’s get started!

1. Repurpose larger content into slideshow formats

This is one of the tactics that I love the most, because the reward vs. time tradeoff is very much in your favor. Recently, the Help Scout team and I published a very long e-book entitled 25 Ways to Thank Your Customers. It did well with our blog’s readers, but we knew it could reach a larger audience if it found the right platform.

Fortunately, SlideShare served as the perfect place to “unleash” our e-book to the world, because it has a very professional audience full of decision-makers who aren’t afraid of in-depth and data-driven content. After an upload and an initial guest post, we were selected for the homepage and ended up generating close to 20,000 views. That’s a very substantial benefit for the simple action of re-purposing existing content!

We even broke down our latest infographic into a slideshow format and uploaded it to SlideShare:

It is also research-heavy, but we know that SlideShare is a popular resource for B2B content marketing in part because so many of its users are working professionals and small-business owners.

Last but not least, I’ve even seen old blog posts get re-structured with some visual flair and uploaded to SlideShare, some even generating over 100,000 views.

2. Make data-driven content easy to consume

If there is one thing that you need to know about SlideShare’s audience, it’s that it isn’t afraid to dig into healthy data sets, especially when they pertain to business and marketing related topics.

One other thing you should know about data-driven content in general is that nearly anyone can enjoy it if it’s presented in a manner that is easy to digest.

Data-centric posts often reach the homepage of places like HackerNews and people love well researched information, but staring at mounds of numeric data can leave a lot of people feeling overwhelmed and not as anxious to “dive in” to the content at hand. This can be easily remedied and made to appeal to both audiences by the use of data-backed presentations that are highly visual and easy to browse.

Our friends at HubSpot did an amazing job with this tactic in their presentation 50 Mobile Marketing Facts:

While a mountain of mobile-centric marketing facts would be too much for the average reader, a collection of well made and generously simple slides allowed this presentation to become incredibly popular, currently sitting at over 92,000 views!

The KISSmetrics channel on SlideShare also does a great job of sharing very data-intensive presentations on analytics, but in a beautifully designed format that is easy to keep clicking through.

All in all, if you have a big set of data that would be perfect for a content piece but you’re afraid that you might overwhelm your readers, definitely look into structuring this content as a presentation on SlideShare.

3. Give a second life to your past webinars

Webinars are some of the most engaging forms of content that you can create. Where else can you present live to a huge amount of current and prospective customers, all while giving them insane value?

One of the few problems with live webinars is that you don’t get all that much mileage out of your slide deck. Once the webinar is over, it seems like it’s time for that presentation to start collecting dust. If you are creating long-lasting (“evergreen”) webinar content, this is a huge waste. Webinar content can find a “second wind” with a deviously simple tactic: upload the webinar decks to SlideShare instead of letting them rot on your hard drive!

One of the biggest marketing webinars this year was the State of SEO Internet Marketing event with Dharmesh Shah and Rand Fishkin. With tons of valuable information that was going to remain relevant for months to come, I knew the HubSpot team wasn’t going to let such a great presentation go to waste.

No surprise when they uploaded it to their highly popular SlideShare channel, and even less of a surprise later when they were able to generate an additional 60,000 views:

This move was a no-brainer. Since the webinar had a registration attached to it, this later release on SlideShare allowed tens of thousands of people to view the content and share it freely, generating leads from viewers even if they didn’t watch the webinar the first time around.

If you ever decide to put on a webinar for your readers, be sure to gain extra exposure with a late release of the slide deck via SlideShare. With thousands of professionals available on the platform, there’s no reason to miss out on getting extra mileage out of each and every webinar deck.

Your Turn

What did you think of these simple strategies for getting more utility out of SlideShare? Let us know in the comments below.

About the Author: Gregory Ciotti is the content strategist for Help Scout, the invisible help desk that makes email support a breeze. You can follow Help Scout on Twitter @HelpScout.

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We’re fixing slow conversions

by Kit Seeborg on September 18, 2012

SlideShare dev team to the rescueOur system had a slow Monday so we’re experiencing some longer than usual times in converting your presentations. If you notice that your presentation doesn’t appear right away like it usually does, be assured that it will. If you’ve deleted a presentation, it may take a little longer but it will disappear soon.

This is a temporary situation and our entire development team is busy working 24 x 7 to get all presentations converted, and all deleted presentations out of sight. Our goal is to be caught up by tomorrow.

We value your time, and appreciate your patience as we resolve this unusual, very temporary issue.

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InSites Consulting: Expanding Their Brand Globally – a SlideShare Case Study

by Kit Seeborg on September 14, 2012

Marketing guru Steven Van Belleghem is managing partner at InSites Consulting and author of “The Conversation Manager.” He is focused on growing awareness and extending the reach of his perspectives on marketing and his company’s vision – SlideShare is at the center of his efforts. With more than 1.5 million views, it’s safe to say he’s definitely doing something right, so we sat down with Steven to find out more.

InSites is a market research firm acting as change agents to connect brands to consumers; they work to help companies better understand the ever-increasing role social media plays in their relationships and apply “forward thinking” to effectively harness its power. Steven, who is InSites managing partner, is responsible for boosting the company’s own awareness and creating new relationships that help connect people to the InSites’ vision and brand.

Not surprisingly, this author of “The Conversation Manager,” which helps marketers integrate word-of-mouth into their daily activities, turned to social media to get the word out on what he and InSites were doing. “Our use of SlideShare evolved over time,” said Steven. “In the beginning, I saw it as a site I could post a few PowerPoint presentations on, but that changed quite rapidly. The moment I saw we had 60,000 views, was the moment I thought ‘we need to do something with this.’”

They saw the SlideShare Network as a way to share their content to boost their marketing thought leadership and brand with a global audience. Using SlideShare Pro, they created a corporate InSites Consulting Network, as well as personal channels for Steven and a couple of his colleagues (Joeri Van den Bergh and Tom De Ruyck).

“I personally see SlideShare as one of my most important places on the Internet,” said Steven. “It’s a digital autograph where people can see all the content I [and InSites] create. When people look at your SlideShare account, it shows them how good your content is – it shows that it’s appreciated by other people. I call it my content conversion point because it’s where I want everyone to ultimately end up.”

To date, Steven has enjoyed more than 1.5 million views of his content. He attributes much of his success to the attention he pays to everything he posts.


“You don’t just put something online and expect you will have people come – you need to create a content marketing plan and link to your presentations to extend your reach.”

Steven advocates actively managing content, which includes thinking carefully about the online profile you want to create and then embedding links in all other online locations – Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, national and international blogs, and everything else – to boost the reach and impact of that content.

“Eventually everyone who gets in touch with me through the digital world gets pointed to my content on SlideShare. Since I have been doing that, the number of downloads and views I receive have increased enormously. My last five to six presentations have about 50,000-60,000 views.”

Since InSites gets unlimited leads from all the downloads of their content, they are able to follow up with the people who are most appropriate – their leads have put them in contact with the press and academic world, as well as business people who want to talk to them about a business proposition.

“Our second objective is leads. SlideShare has certainly helped us internationally. This week I had an email from someone in Eastern Europe who would like us to do for them what we have done in Western Europe – those kinds of deals would never come to us without our SlideShare Network. We have academics who are doing research based upon our data, who would never have heard of us or contacted us without the slides we have online. For deals and exposure to markets that are not our home markets, SlideShare really helps a lot.”

InSites has fine-tuned some of their business practices based on the exposure and data they have gotten from their SlideShare Network. Noting that a lot of people found their content through Google, they broadened the tags they use based on their experiences with the search engine. They also found that two-thirds of the people who downloaded their content were from the US, so they started to have their English translations done by people native to America versus Britain to make sure it really spoke to them.

They plan to continue to use SlideShare as a key element of their branding and lead generation efforts. “We need to work on how to integrate our personal pages with the corporate page better in the future. It’s still a learning process, but we think it’s amazing that 1.5 million people have looked at our content – that’s incredible reach, we are really thrilled.”

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Meet Thirst, Shift Happens, Footnotes & Panipuri

September 12, 2012

Some name it after mountains, planets or Greek Gods. Others run contests or scout community forums to harness the wisdom of the crowds. What are we talking here – its conference room names. But at SlideShare we didn’t have to look far to solve this problem. At Delhi, SlideShare recently moved into a larger office [...]

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Scoop those slides! Curation publishing platform Scoop.it now integrates with SlideShare

September 11, 2012

Scoop.it, the publishing-by-curation platform, is now integrated with SlideShare! Scoop.it uses our API to let you curate SlideShare presentations which are relevant to your interests. You can now publish them as embedded presentations on your Scoop.it topic page and share them with all your social media channels. You want curators to find and scoop your [...]

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