SlideShare should be an integral tool in the DoD Strategic Communications portfolio to convey leadership’s vision, strategies, initiatives, and success stories. Every program, project, or organization would benefit by leveraging SlideShare for their *PUBLIC* briefings. DoD has a SlideShare account, with some strategies and social media guidance posted.
SlideShare enables you to communicate your message to a wide array of stakeholders by empowering them to share your briefing via multiple forums. Major public briefings today are either emailed to a limited group, posted to a website, or simply not shared. By uploading the same briefing to SlideShare, it allows others to embed it into their websites and blogs (like the slides below) or download. Users can also share your slides via email, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
The comments section allows readers to offer feedback, share best practices and lessons learned, and pose questions to the author or community. This transitions from the limited, one-way communication to a more dynamic collaboration across the community. The site allows users to subscribe to posts from an individual or organization, find related presentations and documents, and see your colleague’s favorite presentations. You can also see the number of views and downloads a presentation has received to understand how much interest and attention it has received.
Federal Government SlideShare accounts include: The White House, NASA, US Army Social Media, US Navy Social Media, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Some must read SlideShares include: Death by Powerpoint, Shift Happens, 100 Things to Watch in 2011, and You Suck at Power Point.
When DoD leadership announces its Defense Strategic Guidance, Budget Decisions, Strategic Management Plan, or National Military Strategy, their staffs post SECDEF Speeches, DoD Publications, and News Transcripts to Defense.gov. They should also post the slides and documents to SlideShare.
DoD leaders frequently speak at conferences and other public forums. While the conference organizers may want to limit access to the slides to the paid attendees, many post them on their website for all to see. AFCEA has a SlideShare page and started to share some presentations, videos, and documents.
As Power Point is the leading tool for DoD personnel to communicate with each other, SlideShare would enable a broader and deeper communication network to convey your message and collaborate with others to achieve your mission.
Phase 2 of DoD adoption of SlideShare is to examine leveraging the site (or a competing one) inside DoD’s firewalls for the thousands of briefings created annually across the DoD. Sites like SlideShare can rapidly promulgate knowledge, strategies, training, and strengthen the professional network to maximize collaboration.
Filed under: Collaboration, Crowdsourcing, Social Network Tagged: Briefings, Power Point, SlideShare 
You know, Peter, what I’ve found is that SlideShare gets pretty good search engine placement as well. So it’s not just making content more widely available – it’s making it much more discoverable.