Presentations have come a long way since powerpoint. The days of swooshing text and dissolve transitions are long gone. Social media and mobile technology have rendered powerpoint, once the premiere presentation program, nearly archaic. In order to be seen, slideshows need to be mobile, visual, and sharable in both their creation and presentation. Cloud-based databases like googledocs and dropbox make filesharing a breeze and negates worries over where the most recent edit of a slideshow is saved. Upload a slideshow to embeddable hosting platforms and let your presentation go viral. Get your presentation out of the closed conference room confines and out on to the wide web.
The new way to present:
- SlideShare – Upload and embed powerpoint presentations, effects and all.
- GoogleDocs – Build one presentation simultaneously from anywhere and export as a PPT or PDF.
- SlideRocket – Feature-rich and playable on iPhone and iPad.
- Zoho – 3.0 is light like GoogleDocs with more features.
- Facebook – Try turning slides in to an album and really get people to stalk your ideas.
- Tumblr – Embed your presentation and watch it re-blogged again and again.
What worked for us?
Busy schedules don’t always allow for group meetings. Easily meet on the fly with people from all reaches of the globe. Use skype for quality audio and video calls across the world. Google+ hangouts are your mobile team room. Schedule a hangout, and join group members in a multi-way video call. Google+ hangouts detects speech and predominantly displays whomever is talking. Have a video or file to share? No worries. Play, share, broadcast your files for the group to see. Their chatter stops as you present. All automatically, and for free. Use a twitter hashtag to keep group members and project followers in the loop. Update them often with news and announcements. Reach out to your followers on LinkedIn and Google+. Use this hashtag later to measure how far your message reaches.
No need to toss around a clunky file between computers or worry about compiling pieces of a presentation: build it together. GoogleDocs supports basic slideshow presentations. Upload an existing powerpoint file to edit, or create one from scratch. All users can edit in real-time from anywhere. Export your final presentation as a powerpoint file, PDF, or as images.
Get that slideshow out there. Use relevant hashtags, including your own, to share your presentation on twitter. Engage in discussion. Answer questions. Don’t just announce. Embed your final show in to blog posts on wordpress and Tumblr and follow up with comments. This is the opportunity to get your message heard. Check out our presentation below, Listening Socially: Digital and Social Media and the Music Industry, to see these tools in action.
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