By Gini Dietrich
At Content Marketing World in Cleveland, I had the opportunity to meet Paul Shirer, the founder of SlideBatch.
I then had lunch with Paul and Ed Mayuga in Boston at the MarketingProfs B2B Summit and learned more about this cool new tool.
I was expecting it to be just another thing that I would feel uncomfortable when they asked me what I thought, but I was blown away.
It’s super cool and it has huge benefits for a PR pro.
What is SlideBatch?
SlideBatch is the solution for “making web content visual and powerful.”
They say a buyer will view eight media items before making a decision and where they find those can be scattered across the web.
Now you can (for lack of a better term) control what people see and how they see it.
You can drag media files from your desktop, from Dropbox, SlideShare, or Flickr. Or you can add items from YouTube, Vimeo, news, blogs, and even the social networks.
You create the batch, design a customized player, select a template ,and choose color theme, and voila! It’s all ready for you.
It can be played on any device, embedded on any site, or downloaded by users. AND it can be public, private, or shared to a small group.
The cool thing about public batches is they can be shared on social media sites, which is exactly what they did for me before I landed in Boston.
A short video tells you more.
Why Do I Care?
SlideBatch is going to change the look and feel of your newsrooms forever.
No more manual updates to the newsroom every time a story runs.
Instead of—every time a story runs about your organization or about one of your clients—and creating an image, writing a couple of sentences to entice people to click, and then linking to the original story, you can create a Batch.
To give you an example, I created one for our client, UGN.
This hangs out at the top of their news page and the rest of the media kit follows.
It’s a very visual way to provide social proof to journalists who ask the inevitable “who else has covered these guys” question.
The other cool thing is you can choose how you want it to appear on your site.
It was really easy to add the client’s logo and a photo of their Mexico facility to the background. It has the same look as their forthcoming new website.
I mean, really. It took less than 10 minutes to create this the very first time I used SlideBatch.
It’s kind of a no brainer.
The hardest part of the whole thing may be convincing your boss or client to let you embed it on the site (I believe in asking for forgiveness instead of permission, especially if you have access to the site).
It’s professional, it’s interesting, it’s new, and it’s risk-free.
I Want SlideBatch!
It’s ridiculously easy to get started with SlideBatch.
Just go to the home page, click “create a batch; it’s free” and log in either with Facebook or your Google+ account…or you can create your own login.
In the upper lefthand corner, click “add batch” and search your keywords.
Add files from the search, from your desktop, or from the cloud.
You can add by the best match or by date.
Once you’re finished, you can publish it publicly, or decide to keep it private or by invite only.
You also can install the Chrome extension to add content to your batch as you travel the web.
The cool thing about it, though, is once a batch is published and embedded, it automatically refreshes with new content when it’s published (assuming it has your keywords in it).
Go check SlideBatch out. Play around with it. See what you think.
It’s free and it takes hardly any time at all. Totally no risk just to test it out.
Happy batching!
P.S. I get nothing out of this deal. I just think it’s super cool and think you will love it, too.