Forget about slides. In today’s hyperlink world, a classic presentation feels like being inside of a corridor without the option to enter any of the side doors.

If you’re still stuck on PowerPoint presentations, it may be time to try out more dynamic alternatives, like Prezi, which has the financial and advisory back of TED and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

TechCrunch contributor Robin Wauters called Prezi “the coolest online presentation tool I’ve ever seen.” And Garr Reynolds, who coined the phrase ‘Presentation Zen,’ earlier this year declared Prezi a presentation tool more suitable for the digital natives than its competitors.

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Being a social media strategist at Microsoft, by way of Projectline, involves much more than just tweeting and maintaining a Facebook page. It’s about building community. Our product, one in the educational sector, requires a lot of online networking. I work hard to establish and build trust with educators around the world. Microsoft is a behemoth of a company and while you’d think the MSFT name would give you a shoe-in to any community – it simply doesn’t.

Teachers want to know that you are just as passionate about education as you are about the product you are marketing. To show them this, I usually sign my name at the end of my tweets to help give them a personal touch. Many social strategists and community managers sign only with their initials in this fashion:  ^EB. I go the extra mile and sign: -eric. On Facebook, I will send them personal e-mails and comments with my own profile (Eric Burgess) as well with my Mouse Mischief profile. It’s absolutely crucial to be as reachable as possible to your customers. The old ways of conducting customer service through 800 numbers and expensive CMS e-mail software are on their way out. People want immediate access to you, so why not give it to them? It’s all a part of the community building I mentioned earlier. How can you build a community without making you and your product as transparent as possible? You can’t. Below are some important things to consider as you work to build your community.

1. Are you Tony Hsieh’ing it?

Tony Hsieh is the founder and CEO of Zappos.com. Hsieh inspired me to get into social media. He was one of the first people I followed on Twitter and I was completely blown away by the amount of time he spent tweeting. He was so passionate about his customers that I consider him a social media pioneer: He used it to grow his business. And, he was reachable to everyone. I actually received a message from him when I responded to one of his tweets. What CEO does that? How could an online shoe business have nearly 1.7 million followers? Hsieh worked hard at growing his community. You’ve got to Hsieh it to stay in it. Read more…

From such viral hits as I Can Has Cheezburger to helpful tools like Walk Score, hundreds of startup companies have their roots in Seattle’s thriving entrepreneurial community. This Q&A is the fifth in a series of interviews with Seattle-area startups.

Dave Schappell, Founder and CEO of TeachStreet

1.  What is TeachStreet?
TeachStreet helps people find classes–local or online–in hundreds of lifelong learning topics. Classes run the gamut from Spanish, piano, yoga and SEO to dog training, wine appreciation and more. If you want to learn it, we’ve got teachers and schools for you.

As a marketplace (like eBay), we help teachers and schools get more students by providing them with easy-to-use tools and services to promote their classes. We offer tools so that independent teachers can set up their classes and collect payment. And we also work with large nationwide class providers (such as Kaplan Test Prep) to generate student referrals.

Essentially, we built TeachStreet to create a place for people to explore their passions and help them enrich their lives through learning.

2.  What are some interesting classes offered on TeachStreet?
Go in and search for the craziest things you can think of, and I bet we’ll have classes for you. Poker? Cat training? Hammered dulcimer? Swordfighting? All our learning categories are listed here.

3.  How large is the TeachStreet community?
We don’t disclose actual member numbers (teacher or student counts), but the website’s been live since April 21, 2008, and in just the last month we’ve had more than 170,000 visitors from more than 170 countries. The great majority of visitors are from the United States, since our local classes are currently restricted to the U.S. But online classes (added late in 2009) are starting to attract students worldwide. Read more…

I spent half of my March trying to convince journalists, thought leaders and academics in Boston, New York, and Washington that “something was in the air” on our end of the country.  It’s a hard sell in a region that has so many powerful, rich, entrenched institutions (from the media capital, to the federal seat of power, to the Route 128 Corridor).  As someone who built my career in the northeast, I always had the sense that they had it “figured out.”

But the digital media revolution, combined with the Great Recession has turned a lot of what we once considered self-evident, upside down.  What was once bedrock has been shaken to the point of crumbling — old business models of mass media, faith in Wall Street’s unbridled approach to capitalism, impregnable university endowments.  Suddenly, as an ambassador of a self-sustaining graduate program within a state-funded university, far, far away from the corridor of power, I had an opening.  I spoke of my own transformation from corporate media journalist to independent storyteller, of how we were partnering private and public entities in our region with our students to produce groundbreaking work (which we call “community scholarship”) and how we were pioneering collaborative methods of education through a re-imagination of the classroom (the “Media Space” — we have a name for everything).

And I spoke of our desire to embody what we stand for in our upcoming event, TEDx Seattle.  I’ve always wanted to position our MCDM program at the heart of our community, and its values.  I was recently inspired by a blog post by the founder of Seattle startup Knowledge Mosaic, who said:

The most interesting and vital businesses understand and embrace the idea that where they come from determines who they are.

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I came across Robert Darnton’s beautifully articulated essay collection, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (2009), while looking for a book to review for class. Darnton’s book intrigued me from the first glance. Aside from the effective title, its warmly designed, aptly metaphorical cover drew me in, inviting me to flip through its pages. This is an experience that is unlikely to be matched by a digitized copy downloaded via the Internet, to be read on an electronic device.

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Trust is perhaps the most critical element as the media become “democratic, decentralized and diverse” as Hanson Hosein stated early in his presentation, “The Storyteller Uprising” at Seattle’s Town Hall.  There are many experiments in developing trust, like NPR’s model for curating local bloggers as reporters in the Hurricane Ida and Haiti disasters.  Universities are also in the enviable position of having scholars with credibility in their field, given their intense and often lifelong research in a field.  Some universities are taking full advantage through platforms they manage, like the MIT Technology Review Others are wisely creating a crucible for the next generation of scholars, activists and journalists.  University of North Carolina is a great example of community scholarship, multimedia journalism and activism.  Seems like an unreachable goal, eh?  But check out the work created last fall by a group of 21 students and 5 faculty in the Galapagos Islands. http://www.livinggalapagos.org/

UNC living galapagos map

Living Galapagos has won several awards for innovation and journalistic quality – all well deserved, I think.  There is great storytelling by the residents, beautiful photography, and the unveiling of thorny issues about economics, tourism and sustainability.  Taken together, these can ignite passion in readers of the site.  But, as you also pointed out – how does one sustain the passion?  I did a cursory review of google looking for efforts to expand the message and link to others that can help, as Lance observed, to “take the news and translate it into things to do.”  It’s just not there.  Too bad.  Let’s hope there are other elements in the works.

I’m certainly going to keep an eye on UNC’s journalism program and share what I find here on campus.  We have a real connection to activism here at the UW through various programs like those at the Evans School of Public Affairs, which produces more Peace Corps volunteers than any other public university,  that may help our students create the stories AND sustain the passion.

Here are my slides from our December 2 2009 info meeting.

IndieFlix Play It Again Podcast with Masizakhe Filmmaker Scott Macklin Hosted By Lois Fein

“We are each other’s best and most powerful resource.”