Maybe I’m the last person to know about this. I can be pretty slow on the uptake. But Scribd.com may be the latest in a parade of mandatory sites, just like YouTube and Facebook.
Scribd is a mix of social media and document sharing. It gives anyone the ability to upload whatever document they want into the public domain. If you are a writer, it’s a quick way to self-publish. If you are a business, it becomes a way of getting your message on the internet for the patient reader to peruse. No, it isn’t Twitter, and what you put on there is going to be much more than 140 characters – Scribd actually has entire books available for reading right on its site. And it’s entirely free. But if you are a private company, not publically traded that is, this might be one good way to get information about the business to your clients without slaughtering innocent trees.
It all comes back to “the cloud” — the big datasphere that hangs over all of our heads, and can be tapped into by anyone with an internet connection. This means that things that used to be on hard disks, flash drives and PDAs are now kept on the Internet.
If you used a company such as dropbox.com, you may upload your latest presentation to your box and then disseminate the link to your employees, saving your inbox and theirs from carrying around a bulky PowerPoint presentation. I wrote a review of a small company called drop.io that is part of the cloud computing movement.
Scribd will let you upload any PDF file that you can cram on there. If you have a new product, you can upload a facts sheet. You just finished your novel and you can’t find a publisher, you can PDF that masterpiece and have it available to all.
Creating an account is as simple as entering your email address and creating a password. Within seconds you have a brand new account and a few seconds after that you have your first document uploaded. Scribd assigns your document a unique URL and then it is in the datasphere forever. Here is a project from my copy editing class last year that I uploaded. It is a redesign of UR’s student newspaper. You like it?
You can also embed these documents into a website. In some ways this is neatest feature because its reader is much faster than a plain PDF file, which can be frustratingly slow to load, or even Google Books, which can also be a pain to use.
The social media aspect is interesting because, just like any site that has social media functions, once you create a profile you can subscribe to the documents that other people are uploading. It also has a status update, similar to Facebook and Twitter, where you can “Scribble” what you are reading or post a link to a document, so that the people following you on Scribd can see what going on with you.
Of course there are endless things that could go wrong with Scribd, as with any social media site. The wrong thing could get uploaded and then you have a PR nightmare. But these things seem less likely on Scribd because you have so much control over what is posted. If you accidentally load the file named, “The Company Is Tanking,” you can take it down just as quickly.
The main problem with Scribd is piracy. Just like YouTube, there are thousands of copyright infringements uploaded almost daily. So, you might consider this before putting your company’s credibility in with Scribd. But the company has been taking steps to fixing this problem, so don’t be scared off prematurely.
Beyond having yet another social media outlet for disseminating your brand, Scribd is a good resource as well because there is all kinds of good information to be found on it. Recently there has been an influx of Windows 7 material on the site. In fact, you can download the entire user’s guide right to your computer, a flipbook that might have cost you $20 in a store.
What Scribd offers is a huge, ever expanding database of documents and information. According to Compete.com, the traffic has dropped off a bit in recent months. But it is still a popular site and traffic has picked back up recently. So give it a shot.
David Larter covers technology for BizSense. Please send news tips to David@richmondbizsense.com.
