The Long Tail of Presentations (Be Findable!)

I've posted my presentations from time to time here on my blog, and typically hosted (in the end) at slideshare.net.

Although I've been a reader/viewer of presentations on slideshare.net for some time, I only began posting presentation to the site 7 months ago.

Why is that?

There were many reasons why I believed this was worth a bit of experimentation:

1. For content that I've already shared publicly already, this is a good central location for me to refer people to. Any time I present now, I simply point people to slideshare.net/dan.keldsen and away they go. Solves the problem of conferences or other events that do not have a presentation sharing location, and even if they do, provides the ability for people to see what else I'm yammering about (context and discovery is awfully handy).
2. Experimentation with "2.0" tech, and the ability to easily share/embed content, in my blog, YOUR blog, or anywhere else - makes it that much easier to get even more life out of my presentations. Re-usability and broad distribution is a great benefit of where we are in the state of the web these days. Simple standards and mechanisms win out over complexity every time. Please, feel free to refer to my presentation as you like - simply attribute appropriately, and link back to the slideshare repository (or wherever I've posted it).
3. If I'm sharing information already, for example a presentation I gave 6 months ago in Denmark entitled "Who's the Boss, MOSS?"- I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people on the planet didn't make it to that presentation. So why not open the information to a much larger audience? There were perhaps 50-75 people in the room - yet on slideshare, 1861 views have totaled up since I'd posted it the day of the presentation. That's a nice magnification of the audience - and in this case, that "Long Tail" is one heck of bigger audience than I'd had at my disposal in the live audience.
4. Like many of the other things I do, blogging and podcasting for example, you don't have to take my word for it that I know what I'm talking about - you can go and experience it for yourself. So rather than reading what I have to say about myself on a resume (or LinkedIn) about my experience and expertise (and I try to be as truthful and upfront as possible, but nobody is perfect - and as Seth Godin says "All Marketers are Liars" - see video of Seth on this topic)

There are many more reasons, and I'd love to hear what others are finding as either useful or useLESS about such a resource. There is almost no downside to posting your presentations - as long as they are meant to be public at all, the broader reach you can gain, the more usefulness that content will have to you and your potential customers, next potential employer, existing customers, etc..

And to simply whack you over the head with my point, and tie this to our current research - the Market IQ on Findability (due out in June, pre-register for the public webinar) - you can't FIND what isn't available in some findable form.

You may have some brilliant presentations sitting on your desktop/laptop - but unless it's out there, somewhere, in a format that allows it to be searched or otherwise navigated to, nobody will ever know about it. As I said in a somewhat controversial post recently, ideas are nothing - it's executing on them that's the trick. Take it another step, and even execution on the idea isn't enough. If you have a 100 MPG car that's in production, but nobody knows it exists, then you may as well not have bothered, as the end effect is ZERO. That's marketing, folks, and it applies both for the outside world (to consumers or other businesses) as well as internally to your organization (making people aware of what you can do as an employee).

Search isn't magic - and this business of the "Long Tail" which has gotten considerable hype since Chris Anderson's article in Wired and expanded missives in the book released in 2006 is not just applicable to consumer-facing services, and specifically about SELLING.

Much of the content that should be powering your organization is stuck in silos (such as your inbox) which might be of incredible value within your organization. And merely lamenting that information is in your organization, and going about in recreating a sales proposal, a PowerPoint presentation, or pursuing a line of research isn't just a bad idea, it is a huge waste of the existing resources of your organization.

Re-invention/re-creation is a tax on your organization that isn't adequately accounted for by typical financial accounting methods. Findability plays a key role in breaking that cycle - take a listen to a podcast interview I had done with Stan Garfield a year ago on "Reinvention Prevention" - which discusses this issue of findability for knowledge and innovation purposes.

To wrap it up - we've closed the survey for the Market IQ on Findability, stay tuned for the final report, and please feel free to pre-register yourself for the free public webinar where we'll be discussing the findings.

In the meantime - what is YOUR personal experience in the "Long Tail" - whether as a consumer (the "traditional" sense of the Long Tail), or within your enterprise? Are your colleagues understanding this? Is this a reason that gets people to contribute their content into a content management system, wiki, blog, etc.? Has it had any affect at all? Would love to hear how people are thinking and acting around this type of thinking.

Comment away!