Haiku Deck Rock Star Series: Building Thought Leadership

We believe everybody has ideas and stories that are worth sharing — yes, you!

It might be social media tips, a unique approach to landing real estate listings, or thoughts about the future of education or ecommerce, but your unique expertise and insights can help others interested in your topic, and they can help you extend your personal brand as well through thought leadership.

At work we think and talk a lot about presentation technology and trends (naturally), but I don’t always take the time to zoom out and capture these thoughts.

When I noticed that one of the month’s showcase themes on SlideShare was “Future Of…,” it was pretty easy to put this together.


The Future of Presentations: Top Trends for Communicators – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

I uploaded my Haiku Deck to SlideShare (where it reached more than 10,000 people in a single weekend), shared it on all of my social networks, and added a link to my email signature. Sometimes I’m wowed by how quickly content like this can spread when you just put your ideas out there.

Sometimes I’m wowed by how quickly content like this can spread when you just put your ideas out there.

What kind of thought leadership content could you create? What have you learned or observed this year, or what trends do you see for next year? I’d love to see your thought leadership Haiku Decks out there, spreading ideas and inspiration.

What have you learned or observed this year, or what trends do you see for next year?

To make it easy, here’s an idea sharing template you can use as a visual model, plus my favorite “rock star” tips:


Idea Sharing Presentation Template – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

Rock Star Tips for Creating Thought Leadership Content

  • This is an ideal place to try out the new logo slide type — you can add your company logo or even a picture of yourself to connect your ideas to your identity.
  • For this kind of highly shareable content, you want to make sure your message is self-contained within your slides. It’s a perfect place to use the paragraph slide type to be sure each idea is expressed clearly and fully. (Remember that more and more presentation content is viewed on mobile devices, where Notes may not be visible.)
Building thought leadership: Sample paragraph slide type

Sample paragraph slide 

  • This doesn’t mean you should cram your slides full of text, however — you want to keep your ideas crisp, clear, and easy to scan.
  • You can set your deck privacy to “private” or “restricted” while you’re working on it, but don’t forget to change it to “public” to get your ideas out there!

Rock Star Tips for Promoting Your Thought Leadership Content

Building thought leadership: Optimizing your decks for Twitter

Tweets with images win!

 Your Turn

We’d love to see your thought leadership Haiku Decks! Please share links in the comments, or tweet them with the hashtag #hdgallery.

More in the Rock Star Series

How To Make Company Values Visible

How To Give a Killer Presentation

How To Promote Your Business or Service