Photo credit: http://brokeassstuart.com

Take another look at the picture. Get an idea about what you think is happening. Maybe even quickly make up a story in your mind about the people in the picture.

Now take a look at the picture again, but this time note what’s written on it, and in the context of this being a marketing blog.

Photo credit: http://brokeassstuart.com

Did the story you made up about the picture change after reading the statement, “Marketers Should Get This Right”?

What is the statement communicating?

Unless someone told you the story about how the statement relates to the picture and how that relates to you, or to marketing, trying to understand what it all means could be a waste of time.

Creating context – not a groundbreaking idea, but as marketers, we’re fighting for milliseconds of people’s attention, so context should be top of mind. And if you're a consultant, you might only have a few seconds to capture the attention of a Senior Vice President you're pitching an idea to.

Figure out a way to help the person relate to you, and then create context around how you can solve their problem.

Alright, now that we've arrived at the point of the post, this brings me to SlideShare.

SlideShare: great for publishing, not so great for context

Most marketers seem to love SlideShare, me included. SlideShare is an SEO-friendly publishing platform, and this feature alone makes it valuable to anybody with a message to share.

But, people’s attention spans aren't going up anytime soon, so to win the fight for attention I think publishing platforms like SlideShare should develop a way for their communities to create context around their content.

When I walk through a presentation on SlideShare, I don’t necessarily want to be left to my own devices to decipher how to take action on what the presenter is trying to communicate.

Creating context around the content people publish can make it much easier to get the most value out of what SlideShare can be as a community-driven resource to solve people’s problems.

How SlideShare (and you) could create context around your content

I just have one not-amazingly-creative idea for SlideShare – let your community publish a video that accompanies their presentation, and that plays in synchronicity with the presenter’s slide deck.

In the context of the idea, I use the word “synchronicity” to mean that SlideShare could add value to their platform and create a better experience by engineering a way for people to deliver their ideas and solutions that connects with auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners (sort of for kinesthetic learners).

I know SlideShare lets you embed a YouTube video in a presentation, but the idea is to let their community create context by publishing a video of their conference session or a video they shot on their own to specifically accompany their presentation.

And for conference organizers who hold the distribution rights to their session videos, maybe you could get creative with licensing the video content you own?

Storytelling

Hopefully in the future platforms will be engineered to give their community of publishers a better way to tell a story. I think that is very good for the mind.