Social publishing is an interesting area of the Internet these days.  By social publishing I am referring to web sites where users can post their original documents and share them with the world.  These documents can then be commented on, downloaded, embedded, indexed, ranked, and shared by others.  The services are typically integrated with the big three of social media so that with an engaged audience the documents can get fairly broad distribution.  Two of the more well known social publishing services are SlideShare and Scribd.

A couple of years ago I waded into social publishing on SlideShare.  I uploaded a presentation on the GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition Work.  To my surprise the rather ordinary deck garnered hundreds of views.  I then put my BarCamp presentation "That's What You Twittered."  This much more interesting deck has over 1,000 views.  All in all my the presentations I have uploaded to SlideShare have garnered over 8,000 views.

Well during the last makeover of FoG I decided to make some changes to the about section.  Specifically I wanted to change the way my formal bio and resume were presented, primarily to make them more of online reputation management devices.   Through Marta Kagen's SlideShare presentation, What The F**K is Social Media I had come across her personal site.  She had her bio and resume on Scribd.  I liked it, it seemed to rank well, so I decided to do the same.  It worked.  The resume consistently ranks as a top search engine result and has been viewed a thousand times in the last year.

So last Fall when we were doing a major overhaul of atdc.org to fit the organization's new strategic direction, Blake Perdue uploaded eight of ATDC's resource documents to Scribd.  Our primary objective is doing so was brand building, to make more people in the startup community more aware of ATDC and the type of things it does.  Those documents have had nearly 30,000 reads in just over five months.  These reads are being driven by Google search results.  The docs are top results on the search phrases executive summary template and positioning statement among others.  Strong stuff that is helping to build the brand of ATDC as a leading technology accelerator.  We are currently in the process of tweaking the docs a bit to determine how to best use them as online reputation management tools as well.

These experiences demonstrate that social publishing is an effective tool that can work well for both individuals and organizations.  You should make it a part of your online marketing mix.