Celebrating 100,000+ views of our presentations & some thoughts

A few days ago while exchanging ideas with our friends at Slideshare (“the YouTube of presentations” that is possibly going to monetize better than YouTube and certainly cost a lot less), we thought about making a count of the views and downloads we had over the 20+ presentations we put on there. All those presentations we put online after presenting at a couple of dozens events around the world in the past year or so (Beijing, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Washington DC, …).

We mentioned previously that we had an “A-Ah” moment when after a conference in Sydney last year with 300+ in attendance, we had several thousands online viewers of our presentation, some of which led to… more presentations (we were invited to GSP East in Washington then to San Francisco thanks to it) but also many contacts, leads and several research & strategy projects. Should we spend more efforts on “offline appearance” or PPT design?

In addition to having more time to share insights and interesting stories in conferences than in blog posts, conferences are still a very good value proposition in terms of branding and visibility. Someone wrote that he was now preparing presentations so that they could be posted online. You’ll see below that this is not a bad idea as the “online reach” is way higher than “offline reach”.

In most conferences we join, the audience varies between a few dozens to a few hundreds, now here are the figures for the presentations we put online:

Total presentations: 24 + 3 off-site presentations
Total views: 101,563
Total downloads: 6,978
Most downloads/views: Mobile payment

Top 5 views:
#1 | Comparison of Leading SNS, notably thanks to the interview by ReadWriteWeb
#2 | Comparison of mobile SNS
#3 | Inside QQ (the 2009 update is coming – a bit delayed by projects ^_^; )
#4 | Digital Korea
#5 | Mobile SNS – best practices from Asia

Our favorites:

• Overview | Asia’s best of breed
• Mobile | Is 3G a dog or a demon? Hints from 7 years of 3G hype in Asia
• China | Mobile & Web innovation in China
• Korea | Digital Korea
• Japan | Mobile handsets innovation
• Online video | Future of TV and Video from Asia
• Virtual worlds | Virtual worlds in Asia
• East & West | The Digital Silk Road
• E-commerce | From o-commerce to e-commerce
• Creativity | Inspireware

In addition to providing exposure, Slideshare also offers many interesting resources. To name a few in our field, we gladly recommend Morgan Stanley’s star analyst Mary Meerker’s slideshows, CIC Data’s China IWOM presentations by Chief IWOMer Sam Flemming and Sequoia Capital’s “RIP Good Times“.

While experimenting with remote presenting (via Skype, for instance), it is interesting to consider the value of being physically somewhere vs. being “reachable” via IM, email, Twitter or else during an event. Our feeling is that many event organizers are yet to tap into the value of enabling higher levels of discovery and connectivity between on-site and off-site participants, as well as providing exposure and connectivity not only during but also before and after events. If you know of good examples of “conference 2.0″ or best practices, you are welcome to contribute ideas on twitter with the tag “#event20″.