The Internet has obviously gone well beyond a place to post information; we’ve passed from the information age into the social networking age. The interlinking of personal and business lives with an unprecedented ability to exchange information ranging from the pointless to the severely relevant is at our fingertips 24 hours a day.

 I’ve found that I can now find out what people I haven’t seen since high school graduation had for breakfast just about any time of day I check Facebook. We’re all bantering back and forth like we are sitting in homeroom again – which honestly is kind of fun and often rather entertaining. We already know each other, and we’ve already likely seen our youthful … well … I won’t incriminate myself here.

LinkedIn has emerged as one of the more relevant business networking sites – and it developed into a great way to reconnect with old colleagues and maintain my network. This is all especially relevant in today’s economy! You can connect to my LinkedIn profile by clicking the badge on our blog’s sidebar.

Along with these – and Twitter (we’ll blog that one later) we discovered a great resource in www.slideshare.net which is indexed database containing an amazing array of content consisting of the presentations submitted by members around the world.

Artisans is maintaining our content at http://www.slideshare.net/esaperstein

This information is also on our website – but our website does not give us the ability to quickly and automatically post our presentations to Facebook, LinkedIn, and dozens of other social networking sites. SlideShare also seems to have a jump on search engine optimization (SEO) – we’ve found that content we’ve posted on their site often comes close to, if not jumps ahead of, our own hosted content in various searches.

I haven’t decided if the SlideShare SEO advantage is good or bad for the long term, but given that it works; I’m not stupid – I’m taking advantage of it for our marketing purposes. Our searches have found portfolios from artists, designers, IT consultants, professors, students, accountants, lawyers, environmentalists – well just about everyone is getting in on this!

So here are the points of this blog entry –

#1 If you’re not already engaging in Social Networking – start now or you will find yourself left behind!

#2 Sites like SlideShare are a great aid to marketing any sized business – take advantage of this opportunity!

#3 Take a moment to visit OUR Slidespace, check out our presentations (http://www.slideshare.net/esaperstein) stop to post your thoughts and comments on a few of them, and don’t forget you can share our content on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networking pages! Don’t forget to follow us too!