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In a nutshell, SlideShare lets you to upload a PowerPoint presentation, add audio to it (if you want), and then embed it in your website or blog for visitors to view.

If you’re looking to put together a web-enabled PowerPoint presentation with audio, Macromedia Breeze (now the Adobe Presenter portion of Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional), is a pretty sweet product.

But if your needs are minimal and you’re not looking for a lot of advanced features, SlideShare.net is absolutely the way to go, and it’s free.

We just launched a new website at Awecomm to promote a new service offering. It’s a complex service, so we wanted to get as much supporting material as possible onto the site. One of the elements is a PowerPoint slide show that we walk prospective customers through.

Largely inspired by the Google’s Adwords Professional learning center (done in Macromedia Breeze), I set off to create a presentation that I could add to the site with an audio track on top of it. I wasn’t positive that I’d be happy with the outcome, so springing for Acrobat Connect was my last-resort.

With regards to the entire process, working with the SlideShare interface was definitely the easiest part.

I started by opening Word and PowerPoint and writing a script for each slide. I then recorded the audio using a hand-held recorder that let me easily transfer the audio to my computer via USB (the files end up in the WMA format). Once I felt comfortable with all of my audio files (they probably took three or four takes a piece to get right), I stitched them together into one big MP3 and got rid of any start/stop noises using Audacity.

Once I had my material set, I uploaded the slide show to SlideShare, and uploaded my audio to one of our webservers. Once SlideShare is done processing the PowerPoint, you simply enter the address of your audio (e.g. http://www.yourcompany.com/audio.mp3), and it merges the two.

Now this is the fun part, and where it all comes together. You use their extremely well-developed interface to tell it when the presentation should move to the next slide. Basically it plays the audio for you, and you tell it when the next slide should start. Kudos to the developers that created this interface; it couldn’t be easier to work with.

If you want to see the final product, check out the embedded presentation on our website (we did some cool AJAX stuff to present it), or view it on the SlideShare.net website.

The Good:

• The price is right.
• The embed option makes it easy to add the presentation to your website or blog.
• Adding audio to the presentation is extremely easy.

The Bad:

• They don’t yet support PowerPoint 2007, and things can look strange if you convert your PPT 2007 document to a PowerPoint 2003 compatible document.
• Some minor UI hickups. The interface doesn’t always provide the greatest feedback, and sometimes after I uploaded a presentation, it would show up on some pages of the site, and not others. Be patient with it.

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If you read my review of Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone, and read the book, this is something you’ll probably be interested in.

Keith is going to be the presenter in a free upcoming American Management Association (AMA) webcast this Wednesday.

Here are the details:

Date: Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Time: 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern
Meeting Number: 17148-00001

and the topics:

• Simple steps you can take today to start building your relationships of tomorrow.
• Key mindsets needed to successfully form and manage deep relationships, inside and outside of your organization.
• Powerful ideas for planning and executing savvy relationship-building strategies.
• And many other secrets for success!

Here’s the link to register (use priority code CE7 when you register).

If you’re interested in more information about Never Eat Alone, here’s a link to the Never Eat Alone Blog.

UPDATE:  If you missed the presentation, you can download it here on the AMA website.

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Here’s some news that should make marketing people at big companies happy.

If you’re a big enough company to have an internal web design and web development department (or maybe just a person or two dedicated to it), you can now get a hold of Awecomm’s website planning and information architecture service, without having us design and develop the entire website.

We just formally introduced the stand-alone service, Deep Discovery, which is the process that we take our customers through when they come to us and say:

“Our website gets good traffic, but we’re not getting any leads or sales from it.”

- OR -

“We’re developing a new website, and we want it to be more than just a brochure. We want it to drive measurable leads and sales.”

For along time we did Deep Discovery as our normal first step in developing a website for a customer (it wasn’t called that at the time). Since 1999 the process has gotten better and the results are always measurable, concrete, and often times mind-blowing (check out some cool case studies on the new site).

Recently we’ve had a lot of requests along the lines of, “we don’t need you to develop it, we’ll do that in-house, we just need your expertise with regards to strategy and ensuring that the new website generates leads, sales, and new business.” The stand-alone Deep Discovery process is the answer to our clients’ requests.

We see this as a huge step forward with regards to our ability to service customers of all sizes.

Definitely take a look through the new MeetDeepDiscovery.com website that we just launched to promote the service. If you’d rather listen to an audio presentation/slide show about the process, there’s a link on the homepage to a short video that I developed using a cool little tool called SlideShare (check back here for a full review of their service within the next week - it’s a great offering, and it’s free!).

Thanks to all of our existing clients who went through this process with us and helped us refine it along the way. Your testimonials and case studies are definitely appreciated.

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