Should Your Organization Use Scribd?

Many of our clients at Forum One produce large numbers of PDF documents (reports, studies, policy briefs) which then are placed in a "documents" section on their web sites. The challenge these organizations face is then making these documents as widely accessed as possible.

One way to increase attention to documents is to use Scribd, a third-party document sharing site (or in shorthand, "YouTube for documents"). We have had good luck at Forum One using Scribd for our clients.

For example, one of our clients produced sixty well-crafted, arcane reports on medical technologies. The reports were getting about 11,000 "views" per year on the client's site. We put them on Scribd, where they quickly received about 50,000 "views" per year. It is difficult to precisely compare web site traffic to Scribd traffic because the notion of "view" may be different (on Scribd it can mean a quick visit to the document's description page). Nonetheless, at relatively little cost, the documents clearly got a lot of new attention.

There are three ways in which Scribd increases "views" of your documents. First, users of Scribd can find your documents through the site's internal search or "related documents" links. Second, Scribd documents generally come up higher in search engine results than documents on your site. Finally, Scribd documents can be easily embedded in third party web sites through the Scribd viewer. Happily, all of these extra views should be complementary to ongoing traffic on your web site.

In addition to increasing traffic, Scribd offers another service of relevance to many organizations. Documents can now be sold via the recently launched "Scribd Store". The store charges a 20% commission, a lower figure than competitors.

For all of its benefits, Scribd does have one drawback: how do you pronounce "Scribd"? (Answer according to Scribd staff: short i.)

So in short, we have found Scribd to be a useful service for organizations seeking increased attention to their documents. Scribd's core services are free, work well, and are worth a try.

Future post: Twitter.

Jim Cashel is Chairman at Forum One. Feel free to write him at cashel@ForumOne.com .