Simon Willison’s Weblog

How can you use SlideShare effectively to grow your professional reputation in a specific niche?

24th August 2012

My answer to How can you use SlideShare effectively to grow your professional reputation in a specific niche? on Quora

“How to integrate SlideShare activities with other social networks”

If you want to increase the visibility of your presentations, one thing you could do is ensure you have an up-to-date speaker profile on our service, Lanyrd. You can list the events you’ve spoken at and the talks you’ve given, then attach your SlideShare presentations.

If you do this, your talks will show up in a bunch of places—they’ll be linked to from your Lanyrd profile, they’ll be featured on the event page and they’ll also show up on any topic pages relevant to the talk.

Here’s an example: I gave a talk about Comet (a fore-runner to WebSockets) at an event back in 2008. Here’s the session page on Lanyrd, with the embedded SlideShare presentation:

The presentation also shows up as a thumbnail on our page about that event:

And since it was about “Comet”, it shows up in the slider widget at the top of our page about Comet as well:

Finally, it’s included in my overall speaker profile, along with all of my other talks: