I was recently browsing twitter and saw a tweet from my friend Kyle Lacy (Founder/CEO of BrandSwag) about a presentation he and his firm had created and placed on SlideShare called “Building Your Personal Brand.” I wanted to share this presentation with you for a number of reasons that I’ll outline below, but particularly because I truly believe that one of the most valuable yet underutilized uses for PowerPoint is developing your personal brand.

What the internet, particularly social media, has done over the last 15 years is to level the playing field for those who want to share their passions with others. 15 years ago if you wanted to write, you did it in a journal that probably never strayed further than the confines of your house. Nowadays it takes less than 10 minutes to set up a blog for free and share those thoughts with the world. You can utilize Twitter to connect with those who share your passions. You can join groups on LinkedIn to post relevant articles and answer questions, establishing yourself as an expert. All of this becomes your personal brand – something that no company can keep as you move along your career path.

SlideShare is a powerful tool when it comes to spreading your personal brand. SlideShare allows anyone to upload PowerPoint presentations to the web. Those presentations can be shared across different platforms by being downloaded, shared (via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.) and embedded (like the presentation above).

We’ve seen the possibilities of storytelling via SlideShare in their World’s Best Presentation Contest. Consider the possibilities of sharing your personal brand if you dedicated the time and resources necessary to create and effective PowerPoint presentation and uploading it to SlideShare. Of course, SlideShare doesn’t magically make your presentation go viral. You’ll need to put even more time and effort into sharing the presentation with your networks and give them a good reason to share it with their own networks.

Personal Branding in Action

Earlier this year a well known email marketing and social media “guru” (says me) DJ Waldow found himself in search of a new adventure in his career. I noticed he had uploaded his visual resume to SlideShare, but it was fairly basic design. So I offered my assistance to make some improvements to the presentation to make it a little more appealing, but his story was strong enough to send numerous potential employers his way.

Chris Ferdinandi, a human resources and social media professional from Boston, MA, created what he calls his “not-so-traditional resume.” The presentation (embedded below) was very well designed, tells a good story, and shows what Chris is all about. But more importantly, the presentation has been viewed over 116,000 times, Liked over 145 times, and has been embedded on other pages over 110 times. How many times has your paper resume been viewed, liked, or embedded? Probably none. (Neither has mine.)

What does all this mean? It means that we’ve moved beyond our personal brands being confined to a Word document. Creating an effective PowerPoint presentation and utilizing the websites like SlideShare, SlideRocket, and Prezi allows everyone the same opportunities to spread their personal brand.

How have you utilized PowerPoint to spread your personal brand?

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