028 SlideShare for the Construction Industry

In today’s episode I talk once again with Mark Johnson, FAIA. Mark shared with me his experience and expertise in leveraging SlideShare.net.

SlideShare.net is to power point presentations what YouTube is to home videos. It is a free service that allows you to share your presentations on the web with a very targeted, large B2B audience.

Mark told me his experience and successes with SlideShare. Here’s a small summary of some of the questions I asked him:

Episode Blurb (to listen to the entire interview, click the orange “play” button on top of this post)

Mark Johnson, FAIA

Cesar: Mark, I read about SlideShare.net recently being purchased by LinkedIn. We all know about LinkedIn for professional networking and online resumes, important to the Construction Industry, but why is SlideShare now so hot?

Mark: Cesar, SlideShare is similar to YouTube, the world’s largest repository for online videos. Only SlideShare is the world’s largest repository for presentations posted online.

These presentations are created mostly by professionals, for a professional audience. They’re very visual, a nice contrast to all the words on LinkedIn.

A “picture is worth a thousand words” as the saying goes. I think that is key to SlideShare’s popularity and why they get 60 million visitors a month to their site.

Cesar: How can using using SlideShare benefit those of us in the Construction Industry?

Mark: Marketing efforts in Design and Construction are largely B2B. Since SlideShare’s users are primarily professionals, it’s a great way to compliment a marketing campaign to reach a professional audience.

‘Business Owners’, the decision makers, are the largest group of SlideShare users.

Presentations on SlideShare can be easily tagged for search optimization. I know a consulting firm that goes to SlideShare all the time whenever they want to research a topic. Presentations are more timely than books and often they include content that was presented to an internal business audience, providing insights into that particular business.

Cesar: So how can this relate specifically to our industry?

Mark: Here are some examples I can imagine based on my success with SlideShare.

I just posted a presentation about Poggenpohl, a manufacturer of high-end kitchen cabinetry. It details their success at the recent Kitchen & Bath Industry Show (KBIS) in using social media to launch a new product line, the ARTESIO KITCHEN. They actually worked with a famous German architect on the product design. This presentation has been viewed over 1,000 times in two days. They have also embedded it in their company blog. It’s driving traffic to Poggenpohl’s website and sharing their new product line (link below).

Technology is a very popular topic on SlideShare’s site. I created a presentation with my friend Eric Schimelpfenig, called iPad+Apps for Designers. Many of the apps we featured are applicable to the construction process, not just design. That presentation went ‘niche viral’ and has been viewed over 21,000 times (link below).

I’ll be doing a presentation on design trends in two weeks at the Southeast Builders’ Conference (SEBC) in Orlando in two weeks. It’s a group panel and we hope for 100 attendees. I decided to put my content on SlideShare to see what would happen. The presentation has been viewed online over 1,000 times in two weeks, reaching over 10 times as many people as we expect to reach at the live venue (link below).

Cesar: These are good examples for building products and construction industry technology and design trends. Do you think sharing construction projects and services would be popular using SlideShare as an online platform?

Mark: I think the possibilities are endless. Yet I would make some recommendations:

Try to include a hot topic in the presentation. This is similar to large construction firms like Turner that offer extensive online education programs for their employees and others. It’s a soft sell for Turner in that they are showcasing their expertise on a construction topic, not just trying to sell services.

I’ve found my SlideShare presentations draw many more viewers when I use other social media platforms to promote the content, especially Twitter when I include links to the presentations. I also embed them in my blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. You never know where people might find you in the world of social networking.

I also belong to about 20 design and construction related ‘groups’ on LinkedIn. So I post a comment with a link to a presentation in any relevant group I can find. The group members are all industry professionals.

For the entire interview, click the orange “Play” button on top of this post.

Episode Links

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