Social Media and Presentation Technology

Speaking—plain-old speaking to an audience—is the original social medium. You use your voice to inform, persuade, or entertain. If you’re good, you do each. If you’re really good, you interact with the audience to help them get what they want from you.

Audiovisual aids are as old as speaking. Think cave paintings. Today, over one half billion people use Microsoft Office PowerPoint™ to help tell their stories. By one measure, over 30 million PPT presentations are created every business day.

Increasingly, “slideware” applications, including PowerPoint, Apple’s Keynote™, and others, have been embraced by social media, giving your presentations longer life and wider reach. And the lack of two-way interaction—a drawback of many traditional presentations—is being addressed by social media as well.

Let’s look at the current intersection of social media and presentation technology, starting with simpler, more entertainment-oriented applications, then on to sophisticated, business-oriented options.

The Fun Stuff

Most MySpace users are familiar with Slide.com. Billing itself as a social entertainment company, Slide develops widgets, or mini-applications that users download and paste on their personal blogs or social networking pages. Chief among these apps is their Slideshow widget. Source images may be downloaded from your storage or transferred from social image-sharing sites like Flickr or Photobucket. Your widget-based slideshow, in turn, may be posted on your page at MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, or your blog.

Animoto recently upped the ante. Animoto takes your photos, combines them with an audio track you supply, and creates a dynamic, Flash-based, rendered video file for your sharing. The website can also host your video; one example is this 2009 Denver Twestival. (Be careful with Animoto and Facebook, however. The app has been known to send a user’s photoshow video to random FB friends of that user. It was part of Animoto’s now-questionable viral growth strategy. They are working on it.)

RockYou.com and Joggle.com are also entrants in this field, emphasizing the music- and video- sharing aspects that younger users enjoy. Slide, perhaps in response to Animoto, recently introduced the ability to add music to your creations.

It may be easy to dismiss Slide and other entertainment apps, but take note that Slide.com was founded by Max Levchin. Before Slide, he co-developed PayPal and later sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion. He was 26 at the time.

The Serious Stuff

Let’s assume your pre-existing PowerPoint slides are ready for sharing via a hosting service. Where do you go from here?

PowerPoint on the Web

Before social media was a recognized phrase, presenters have been posting PPT files on websites. Web visitors needed either the PowerPoint application or the free PowerPoint viewer installed. Security, however, was and is a concern. Posting an unprotected PPT file to a public website lets users download a fully editable copy. Presenters often resorted to workarounds such as converting PPT to Flash or HTML, which remains a popular and viable option. (See How to convert PPT to Flash.) Later versions of PowerPoint offer a more reliable “Save as Web Page” option over previous versions, though not all PPT effects translate to web viewing.

To find web PPT files using Google, add “filetype:ppt” to your keyword search query. Here is an example using the word “Cleveland.”

Shift Happens

SlideShare

Started in September 2006, SlideShare is the dominant website for sharing presentations. One writer described them as “the YouTube of presentations.” Presenters can upload PowerPoint, OpenOffice, PDF, or Keynote files, share presentations publicly or privately, and add SlideShare shows to their blog, LinkedIn profile, or Facebook page. SlideShare shows can also be “Slidecasts” which include an audio track. And since February 2009, SlideShare shows can contain embedded YouTube videos. One popular SlideShare presentation recognized for both visual style and compelling content is Shift Happens.

The SlideShare website permits viewers to leave comments, just like blogs, and authors can respond. It also permits the author to include comments about each slide, similar to the Notes view in PowerPoint. The presentation becomes conversation; this is a huge advent in online presentations.

(I always remind and encourage PPT authors to type their scripts into the Notes view. If printouts are necessary, the full context—slide and script—can live on. Also, colleagues benefit from having source material. It leaves little guessing about what those awkward bullet phrases or pictures were intended to convey.)

authorSTREAM

authorSTREAM is also an online service which allows you to upload PowerPoint files and share them via email link, embed them in social media pages, or play on portable media players. One notable authorSTREAM feature works with your recorded audio “Narrations” in your PowerPoint file. You can create a file in video format (MP4) to upload and share on video sharing sites or show on video-capable devices. One example of a narrated authorSTREAM presentation is Smart Choices: Visual Decision Support . Like SlideShare, authorSTREAM lets viewers interact with presenters via comments.

SlideSix

Another entrant in the social presentation-sharing community is SlideSix. Key difference here is that you can record audio and video directly within the SlideSix management console. The media is embedded directly within your online presentation.

Developer Todd Sharp is chief cook and bottlewasher at this independent, as-far-as-you-can-get-from-Silicon-Valley startup, a point not lost on TechCrunch and their recent review. Mashable took kindly to SlideSix, too.

Others

SlideBoom, OnlinePRESENTER, InstantPresenter, PresenterNet, Speechi and Zentation also host your existing PowerPoint files and enable web-based sharing. Adding audio, converting to Flash, and education market orientation are some of these packages’ features.

No PowerPoint? No Problem!

Big movers in social media slideshows have been software-as-a-service sites which let you create, store, and share, all online. Beyond mere hosting, the promise of cloud computing has everyone’s attention right now, and presentation authoring is at that forefront.

SlideRocket

SlideRocket is slick. (Select and watch a sample.) Built on Adobe's Flex platform, SlideRocket gives you authoring tools, transitions, image and video manipulations, and charting and table creation. (If you have existing PowerPoint slides, you can import those to get started.) You may also import your own fonts or pull in various elements into your presentation. Their growing asset marketplace lets you browse and buy content such as themes, stock photography, cartoons, audio, video, etc. The free account option limits you from paid features like asset sharing and synchronizing for collaborative efforts. For more, see this exhaustive independent review of SlideRocket by Robin Good at MasterNewMedia.

280slides

While still carrying the “beta” tag in its logo, 280slides encourages you to jump right in to a working editor. After you take it for a spin, it’s hard to believe this all takes place in a browser. 280slides stores your shows, shares online, and imports as well as downloads to PPT. Another nice feature: autosave and recovery.

ZohoShow

ZohoShow is the presentation app of the vast suite from Zoho. While not as slick as SlideRocket, the interface boasts most of what you might expect, clipart and all, from PowerPoint circa 2000. Take the ZohoShow tour.

Others

Empressr, GoogleDocs, OpenOffice Impress, PresentationEngine, Prezentit, Spresent, ThinkFree Show, and Thumbstacks all let you create presentation via online resources and tools.

Visit JingProject, ScreenToaster, WebSlides, and Flowgram to see how web pages are supplementing or even replacing slides in presentation. If you have ever needed to present, but display only web pages in succession, then share the sites via RSS, these tools are for you.

Note: there is volatility in this market space. Months ago, four additional websites would have appeared in this grouping, but have not served live pages for weeks.

Last word: On Design

You might gather from sample slideshows above that current presentation design has shifted as much as social media has in recent years. Here is a trio of resources to find out more: Beyond Bullet Points, Presentation Zen, and slide:ology.

These books, and their authors and blogs, document this shift in thinking based on new research on cognitive processes. In part, they are responding to the cries of Edward Tufte and the “PowerPoint is Evil” manifestos.

While everyone agrees with Tufte’s final essay words “respect your audience,” he would likely concede that speaking the right story to the right audience, in their space, at their pace, and engaging them via feedback is the best way to earn that respect. These abilities have been greatly enhanced through social media.

Tony Ramos is a designer and consultant specializing in presentations and proposal graphics. For three consecutive years, he has been designated a Microsoft MVP for PowerPoint for his voluntary contributions to the PPT user community. In 2003, he was the first person to write a weblog about PowerPoint. His blog's most recent incarnation is titled "The Presentationist." His projects range from pro bono presentations to government contract proposals worth $100B. A big fan of Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites, Tony has been involved in computing since punch cards and Fortran. Tony is a decent cyclist, a slow runner and a bad swimmer. He and his wife and dogs live on Cleveland's west side.

Topics: Technology and Applications

Tags: design, powerpoint, presentations, slides