Book Review: Present Yourself

Present Yourself book coverI have a speaking gig coming up, and wanted to pick up tips on making a better presentations.  Also, I wanted to learn how I can more effectively share these presentations on the web and my blog. These goals led me to Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business by Kit Seeborg and Andrea Meyer.

The book description seemed perfect for my needs: “This practical book demonstrates how you can use this visual language to make the story of your organization, brand, or initiative effective and entertaining—and how social sharing networks like SlideShare, Prezi, and Scribd can present your story to a worldwide audience.”

Did the actual book meet these expectations? The results were mixed for me.  I found the chapter on creating and delivering presentations to be pretty light on practical advice. The concept of “Generation C” was thought provoking, but the book didn’t provide many examples or strategies to deal with multi-taskers in the audience.

Chapter 2, Getting Started with SlideShare, felt like a waste. The chapter was largely composed of screenshots for the sign-up workflow of SlideShare.net. This could have been streamlined with a pointer to SlideShare and a checklist of suggestions for setup.

Enough complaining, the rest of the book was pretty valuable to me. These chapters showed how to use SlideShare to get your message out to a wide audience, whether the audience is an industry trade show, internet marketing, research, or careers (job hunting & recruiting). Especially valuable was the section on social networks and the value of content curation.

Overall, I’m glad that I read the book. At first glance, it appeared scattered and I was put off by all of the SlideShare.net screenshots, but after the first read, I learned a lot from chapter 3 onwards.

Note, I received a free copy of this book for review. I will not receive any other benefit or compensation.