Scribd is a free, super-functional social media tool to use. I recommend it highly for anyone working on their personal branding and social media footprint. I wrote a little bit about Scribd for a small group of colleagues and am republishing the info here:
Scribd allows you to post and store online digital documents such as PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and such. It has a number of social media components such as “friends (and I do intentionally put that in quotes), tags, sharing, favorite-ing and subscribing to someone else’s info. I started using Scribd.com a year or so ago when I wanted to post a white paper I’d written. I had permission to share the document with others, but no good means to get a large PDF up online.
You can check out my account and the views per document. I find the analytics informative and interesting. I posted some docs there because I wanted to blog about the content and needed a place to put the info I’d found. For example, the “cool resume” upload (which is someone else’s work) has over 11,000 views in a couple of years. I posted it once to Scribd, tagged it, wrote my own blog post about it, and the rest happened inside of Google and Scribd. 11,000+ views. I’ve also posted articles I’ve written for publications that either didn’t post their content online or posted my article in a way that was cumbersome to find and didn’t produce any “Google juice” for me.
For some backup info, here is a blog post about Scribd: CBS’s MoneyWatch and How to market your business with Scribd. And lots more info is available online. Two thumbs up to Scribd.
