I’ve written many times in the past about Sliderocket – the company that is reinventing presentations for a live, on-demand and insight driven world. Sliderocket is a cutting edge content creation tool, a useful asset store, and an analytics driven delivery channel. It’s this very breadth of functionality that has always been problematic for me. When talking with Sliderocket CEO Chuck Dietrich, I always struggled to know where Sliderocket’s value proposition really lies – be it collaboration, analytics, or content management?

With the fall release, Sliderocket very firmly positions itself. The tagline for this release is that Sliderocket is doing for presentations what blogging has done for media – creating a dynamic location for engagement between parties, rather than the broadcast-only situation of traditional presentation tools. As Dietrich pointed out to me, enterprises generally have two main modes of communication – email for high volume transactions and presentations for deeper communication. The challenge is to increase the likelihood that presentations will be effective when the presenter isn’t actually there – part of this is achieved by giving presentations a truly dynamic feel with comments etc.

So what’s new that has me so impressed? How about things like:

• collaborative comments – allows users to transform presentations into sales and marketing tools by adding feedback forms and custom surveys
• feedback forms and polls – users can create interactive conversations with colleagues, prospects, customers and partners by allowing viewers to provide comments anywhere in the slide deck through virtual sticky notes.
• enhanced analytics – users get real time insights measuring audience engagement and message effectiveness
• a comprehensive presentation dashboard – to manage the performance of all presentations from a comprehensive control center

I’m pretty excited about this – as I’ve said I’ve been watching Sliderocket for awhile now and this is the first release that really gives me a good handle on the unique proposition for the product – it’s exciting. Check out he video below demonstrating some of the new functionality, and have a look at the screen captures below.

Inline comments on a presentation – audience engagement anyone? (Still no way to avoid those darn trolls though!)

A dashboard for a presentation – insights into usage and parameters – all from one place.