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

There are so many times that you NEED to make a decision. You have multiple choices and you don’t know what to choose. And of course I am not talking about choosing Mexican , Italian or Thai food for dinner. There are crucial and urgent decisions that someone has to take for a crisis. Let’s say that your company has a defected product and you need to communicate with all your stakeholders. (Media, customers, employees, government etc..) You need to make your plan and see what you have to do and what you don’t..

So let’s say that there are 4 possible decisions/paths. The best action is to take each path up to the third step. By these you can see the possible effect and result of this path. If you don’t like this result, you try the second path etc. By checking the third step of each possible decision/path you can be proactive and ‘see the future’. So instead of 4 possible actions, you have 4 possible results. You choose the best result and you make (hopefully) the right decision! This makes you to make better decisions that affect the future of your company, career and maybe life!

Yesterday, Golden Gate University launched its new marketing campaign with the title.. “Shine” I don’t think that this is the best idea that they could find. The previous tagline “Get There” was quite more relevant to an educational organization. But ok.. The “Shine” was approved and we launched it..

What about the website? First of all the red color doesn’t at all match with the rest of the page (Blue)… The font size of the tag line is too big and the shadow makes it to look like a night club logo. Yes! (I am not clowning on this.. This is just how I see it)

The pictures? What about the pictures? I have some examples. One can be a banner for eHarmony or Match.com and another can be an ad for sun glasses. GGU can’t come up with better pictures? At least they can utilize their Marketing students for a focus group to get opinions or ideas before they launch the new campaign. I am not saying that the students know more than the MKT team of GGU but they can incorporate their opinion… MKT students can implement their education back to the institution ( use it for an assignment in a class or something).

BTW, the website needs to be refreshed and use an integration with Social Media! Come on.. Faster people!

It was Sunday night when I came back from LA to San Francisco (Bay Area) In this flight I noticed some interesting things that made me to think about San Francisco and its citizens.. Even if I would not know where I am going, I could understand this in the very first moments. This is what happened:

• 5 out of 10 wear The North Face sweaters..
• 8 out of 10 had iPhones
• The guy next to me had a book with the title:  SDK iPhone
• Two passengers were wearing a Google jacket/sweater (employees)
• The 1/3 of the passengers used their laptops during the flight and more than a half were Mac
• When we landed, the guys next to me checked their Twitter and Facebook accounts to see if they missed something..

and many more…..

I like that I live in a city like San Francisco (technological savvy) but this thing is quite awkward..