I’ve gained a new appreciation for giving presentations since I’ve been volunteering with my church’s Jobs Ministry especially since I now have presentations with no proprietary or otherwise confidential information not for public eyes. So I wanted to look into some options for publishing and sharing the slides from my presentations.
Social publishing sites like SlideShare and Scribd are great for publishing presentations because they offer up another vector for Internet users to find out about you and your message. These options also offer such a clean delivery when compared to just posting your PowerPoint slides online and expecting people to download them via a link.
Here are my impressions about some of the leading online publishing and sharing options:
SlideShare. By far the slickest option for sharing my presentations is SlideShare. It lets you publish your presentations in Adobe Flash format. They have their own LinkedIn app, making it a cinch to publish your presentations with your LinkedIn profile. It also includes options to embed your presentation in a blog post, web page, tweet, or Facebook post. There are free and a fee-based Pro version of SlideShare. However, I promise you’ll be able to get a lot done with just the free version. The drawback here is that it is flash-based meaning your presentations won’t play on iOS devices and might get blocked by some network security setups
Messiah UMC Jobs Ministry Social Media & The Job Hunt Presentation
Scribd. While I classify SlideShare as slick, I class Scribd as a clean and simple method for publishing and sharing your presentations online. There is no LinkedIn app available but it does let you embed your presentation in a blog post or web page and share it via Twitter or Facebook.
Google Presentations. Google Docs includes its own presentation application which enables you to share your presentation(s) over the web. It’s part of Google Apps. There are less features and no social tools like the other publishing and sharing options I profile in this post. However, it is easy to publish and share presentations from Google Apps whether it is to the public Internet or within your own project team.
SlideRocket. I’ve been following SlideShare for a while now but haven’t had the opportunity to write about them in depth. It is subscription-based but does off a free version without some of the higher end features. It is available from the Google Apps Marketplace and at one time I hoped that Google would have acquired them so they could replace Google Presentations which I still find to be a bit bare bones. Right now, I am debating on moving my online presentations from SlideShare to SlideRocket
How do you publish and share your presentations online?
About Will Kelly