Lou Franco's Software Business Blog

I want to use SlideShare, but for the most part, my pre-existing presentations don't really fit into what I think works well.

The important thing to remember is to not fall back on bad habits and just make slides full of bullet-points.  Everything Seth, Garr, and Guy said about presentations still matters.

While I'm busy reworking my presentations, I wanted to share some thoughts on why slides that you put onto SlideShare need to be different from the ones you use during your presentation.

Although you upload and synchronize audio -- for the most part, SlideShare users are ignoring this feature. I think it's worth the trouble, but if you aren't using audio synchronization, consider these changes to your presentation:

1. Add a little narrative text if your slides are visual. The slides you use during your live presentations are best if they complement your talk, not repeat it. But this means that half of your presentation is missing on SlideShare. Merlin Mann wrote about this yesterday, and rewrote his presentation with some dialog at the bottom of each slide.
   
   
2. Your slide deck for your live presentation is probably too short. If you are limiting the number of slides, then you might want to think about doubling or tripling the size of your slideshow for SlideShare. Going through a presentation online is much quicker, even presentations that take 45 minutes live only take a few minutes when you view them on SlideShare.  You might need to break up a thought over several slides.
   
   
3. Consider breaking up your deck. On SlideShare, you might want to consider taking a long talk and breaking it down into separate slideshows, and then link them together. This is for a lot of the same reasons single-point blog entries work better on the web than long articles.