This is the sixth in an ongoing series called “Beyond The Big Three,” which highlights social networking sites other than Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. There are tons of other social media outposts on the Web, and they’re great places for associations to curate content. The first five installments can be found here. Stay tuned.

If your organization (i.e. your membership) isn’t ready to dive headfirst into the social Web, there are tons of smaller social media sites that can supplement your communications goals. SlideShare is one of my favorites.

You may have already — unknowingly — used SlideShare. Usually, whenever anyone embeds a slideshow into their blog or sends you a link to a presentation online, it’s hosted on SlideShare. Not only can you share presentations (generally PowerPoint files), you can also upload documents and PDFs.

You can use SlideShare to assist with virtual meeting experiences – if members can’t attend in person, it’s easy to upload the presentation to one location and send the same link to everyone. You can adjust the privacy settings for each presentation you upload, so the links can be private and only accessed by those who have the link.

SlideShare can provide your organization with the tools to easily get your mission or message out to many people. You can even sync audio to your slides for a complete presentation experience.

You can use SlideShare to:

- Get the word out about your organization
- Give information to those who can’t attend an event in person
- Embed presentations on your blog or Web site
- Connect with other association professionals

Another great feature – the transcripts of your presentations will be indexed by Google, which will help your organization be found more easily in search engines.

The site is also searchable, so you can find other presentations and documents relating to association management or your organization’s particular industry.

Check out this — what else? — presentation from SlideShare. It’s a great explanation of how the site can be used, and shows you what an embedded presentation looks like.