Present Yourself Book Review
Authors: Kit Seeborg, Andrea Meyer
This is a book mostly about the web service Slide Share, partly about marketing yourself or business, and a bit about making slides. You can summarize it as “make slides to get leads for your business”. The book includes several case-studies but lacks specific metrics. Some sources for proof would be great, although that’s a rarity in non-scientific books. I can recommend this to marketers and entrepreneurs however you would want to delegate slideshare tasks to a social media evangelist.
The beginning provides a good foundation of presentations and starts about defining visual data. This is key because communication is important to share your idea and mind-mapping is very essential.
The second chapter is entirely how to use Slideshare.net including how to setup your account, customizing your profile, and the features available. It is a manual or guidebook for the Slide Share service at this point. On page 33, the note on figure 2-19 displaying analytics, states it shows “actionable data”, however that is false because it’s not really actionable. You can only view it and not perform any actions with it. References could be made linking other parts of the book to show the benefits of each feature. There’s nothing contrasting why you should upload a YouTube video versus a slideshow.
Chapter 3 is better because it explains public speaking and how to use Slideshare for events. It is a more practical approach describing how to share your presentation online to reach a wider audience integrating it with social media. It also differentiates the type of events and presentations you could make.
Chapter 4 is mainly about marketing by story-telling and research to get the best content. It suggests to curate your content to stand out from the competition which is the same as doing a metasearch and compiling the content you like. Two more tools are mentioned here (Scoop.it and Pintrest) to spread the word about your slideshow.
Reading Chapter 5, on page 92, there is no reference to the provided quote from Inside View so it is difficult to believe that claim. The chapter describes how to add call-to-actions to every slideshow and how to track leads with the PRO account. This is also the chapter the has tips on making more compelling slides.
Chapter 6 on research doesn’t provide enough details to be helpful any differently than a search engine can do. It actually suggests another software tool Zipcast.
The remainder of the book reiterates more of the previous concepts but in a different manner. It focuses more about organizations instead of the individual.
I’ve heard about Slideshare before and uploaded one slideshow months ago expecting to get leads, but it barely got any views so your results may vary.
