Last week, I was interviewed by Kit Seeborg for a post in Slideshare‘s Blog about Sustainable Life Media’s channel.  Here’s what I had to say:

We recently caught up with Nikos Sarilakis, Online Marketing Manager for Sustainable Life Media, the leading producer of sustainable business conferences and educational events. We asked Nikos how Sustainable Life Media’s events benefit from having a SlideShare channel.

One way Sustainable Life Media helps companies grow is through conferences and seminars. How do you use your SlideShare channel to support these events?
At SLM, slideshows and videos are among the most valuable content we create. We want to store them, publish them, share them and then embed them in our website as broadly as possible. SlideShare is a great platform to ensure widespread viewing of this content. We post videos from conferences, slide decks from our speakers’ presentations, press releases, brochures and many other digital media. SlideShare is one of the best tools to promote our conference, increase our brand awareness and have digital content that gets a viral push in social media.

With 76 slidedecks and over 100 videos, you’ve assembled a lot of content. What is your process for managing content additions to the channel?
We try to upload everything we designate as free in order to get more views and target a broader market. Of course we upload only the content that we think is interesting and valuable for our community. We have common thumbnail designs for every conference. It is a dark grey background for the SB’10 Conference, and yellow for the SB’09 Conference. By this we try to create groups (visually) and maintain consistency. The other good thing about SlideShare is that we can make some of the videos or slideshows private and embed them in restricted access pages in our website. By this we can protect our valuable content but also sell it through our website.

Does having a SlideShare channel affect your attendee registrations or your ability to get top-notch speakers?
SlideShare affected our visibility and our brand awareness a lot in the last year! It also helps our speakers and contributors to get better visibility and build their own personal brand identity. This year we are going to use the SlideShare PRO plan in order to get more targeted leads for our conference.

How do you use your channel to help market the events?
This is one major use of SlideShare for us. When you want to attract customers to your restaurant you let them try some of the appetizers for free or you give samples. This is what we are trying to do in SildeShare. We let our audience try out the conference experience by viewing some of our presentations. This was always a successful method of selling and SlideShare helps us do our sampling.

Our number one presentation is our Sustainable Brands 2010 Conference brochure with more than 4000 views and 150 downloads. I’m not surprised by this. It is a very informative and nicely designed brochure that we uploaded only 1 month before the event. I’m sure we would have many more views if we would have done this 4 months earlier. Then we have some presentations from well-known brand names (such as Pepsi and Nestle Waters), featuring stories such as the Sun Chips packaging debacle. Usually best practices and success stories of popular brand names get the most views.

What best practices would you recommend to other companies using their SlideShare channel with their events?
Every day we learn how to use SlideShare more effectively. What we do and we think works best is to upload as much valuable content as we can, tag them correctly, keep a consistent design, branding and messaging, and share them in the right channels with the best tools. If content is interesting it will have results!

View it on Slideshare’s Blog

This is the new Twitter! I’m really excited about the new design, logo, features and UI of the new Twitter. It seems that you cannot manage multiple accounts (maybe they will add this later) but the new design is really good. You can now view pictures, videos and other media in your streamline.

What I see is that Twitter cannibalizes its partners. Tweetmeme lost many users after Twitter launched their own ‘tweet’ button. Now, users don’t have to go to Youtube and Twitpic but view the media files on twitter.com.

Anyway, take a look on the amazing video that they created! I want some of these blue paper birds!

The new Twitter design will be rolling out slowly to everyone. Some will get it tonight!

You can learn more about the new Twitter, here.

There are few services that I love to use. One of these is Mailchimp. It’s a great Email Marketing platform that you easily use and have fun! It’s the company that when you send an Email campaign, it tells you: “Great Job Nikos, have a banana!” These are some of Freddie’s (the chimp) messages that I see every day on my screen.

Anyway, the reason of this post is a video that they posted today on their blog. They talk about the story of “Rudy”, an Email Marketing guy who spams people in order to satisfy his boss. For you that are working in the email marketing (or you want to know more about that) take a look:

Mailchimp has also a Blip.fm account where you can subscribe and listen to their music selections. Good job guys!

1. Tell a consistent story
2. Engage your fans in a conversation
3. Connect the content
4. Fish where the fish are
5. Reinvent business

You can also view the video version here.

Flought, a really fun project, was the winner of this idea. You can find more about the teams that participated, here.

These are some of the pictures that I took during the event. The Startup Weekend took place at the Kicklabs Offices, a very cool place! (Look at the pictures)

It’s one of these times that you find a website that you like. You add it in your bookmarks, you watch all its videos, you buy the book and you even buy one of its notebooks. The 99 Percent is not about ideas.. It’s about making ideas happen. It started in 2009 as a conference and now is a website with videos, articles and tips on how to make your ideas happen.

The creation of 99%, which was launched with our inaugural conference in 2009, sprung from the belief that, as creative professionals, we often focus too much on idea generation and not enough on execution.

There are several inspiring videos on 99%. Seth Godin talks about quieting our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them. Jack Dorsey talks about Twitter’s success and Threadless founders say: The Do-First Work Ethic. Take a look on the 99% latest videos.

Stop thinking and start making this brilliant idea come true!

Sustainable Brands 2010 – Where the Sustainability & Brand & Design Communities Come Together to Shape the Future.

Join 700+ sustainability executives, business and brand strategists, designers, and communications experts who are building brand value through sustainability. Join market-making companies such as Hewlett Packard, Bumble Bee Tuna, IDEO, Johnson & Johnson, Nokia, Coca-Cola, Clorox, Nestle, 3M, Life Technologies, Williams Sonoma, SAP and many others at SB’10.

SB’10 is excited to announce key presenters from among the 100+ top thinkers and practitioners in sustainable brand and business innovation who will be on deck this year to share with you the latest in sustainable brands leadership.

This is a great video that presents the SB Conference! Take a look..

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Sustainability Executives
find new ideas, partners and tools
learn more >>

Brand Strategists
build authentic, transparent brands
learn more >>

Designers & Innovators
better product and service design
learn more >>

Marketers & Communications Pros
tools and language to talk about sustainable innovation
learn more >>

Follow SLM on Twitter and visit it’s Facebook page

This is the brand new SB’10 Brochure

See you there!

For one more year, O’Reilly and UBM Techweb co-produced a very successful conference on May 3-6 in San Francisco,CA. One of my favorite presentations was the one from Drew Houston (Dropbox) and Adam Smith (Xobni) with the title: “From Zero to One Million Users” This is their presentation:

Many great keynote speakers and some of them were: Tim O’Reilly, Ben Huh (I Can Has Cheezburger), Ge Wang (Stanford University, Smule), June Cohen (TED Conferences), Kevin Lynch (Adobe Systems Incorporated), Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare, Inc.) and my favorite Steve Blank (Stanford/Berkeley/Columbia) You can view all the keynote speeches here

Photos from the event:

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp –13 week online sustainability training program intended to get business professionals up to speed on what they’ll need to be competitive and sustainable. Brought to you by the producers of the Sustainable Brands Conference.

Participants will learn from some of the world’s top sustainable business practitioners. Each of our faculty members is a leading sustainable business expert in his/her specialty, counseling many of the world’s top global brands about how to step up to today’s market demands and successfully build business value and brand equity by innovating for sustainability.

The course follows Sustainable Life Media‘s 4-step prescription for building the better brands of the future: “Observe, Re-Design, Measure and Communicate.” In just an hour-and-a-half a week, over one business quarter, you and your teams can gain a solid grounding in the core disciplines needed to move successfully in to the new age of sustainable business. Topics include market drivers, business model and product innovation, supply chain partnerships, brand strategy and marketing, metrics, and more.

If you haven’t yet taken the time to give yourself a full orientation to the basics of building a sustainable brand, now’s the time. Sessions are available live and on-demand.

If you look at the header you will see a new logo for ImNikos.com. Bold letters, white, gray and blue colors and three symbols.

This blog is about Online Marketing, Social Media, Internet and many more that happen in the web. In the web, users communicate and exchange ideas. (symbols)

I’m in Marketing and I know that Branding is very important.. For me ‘ImNikos.com’ is considered as a brand and needs to have a uniformity across the web.

Thanks for visiting my blog and stay tuned for many more interesting posts!