This week, one of my favorite content sharing sites introduced a new way to generate leads.

I’ve long been a fan of the social media sharing site Slideshare. Slideshare allows you to upload presentations, much like YouTube videos, and then have them converted to flash movies that can be viewed on line and embedded into web and blog pages.

The site has grown significantly over the last few years and is also a great place to get some really good and really bad examples of PowerPoint use. Presentation owners can enable all manner of viewing, sharing, and downloading or choose to keep the files for private viewing only.

Slideshare has added a new feature, called LeadShare, that looks very worthy of some testing. Now when you upload your slides you can set-up a LeadShare campaign that allows you to embed a form in your presentations and capture leads of viewers. These LeadShare campaigns can be embedded on other sites too. You have a lot of control over the form and even when in your presentation your prospective lead sees the form.

The “white paper as lead” approach that employs a similar capture method has been around for a long time and companies that engage white paper lead generation organizations can pay as much as $100 per lead. The LeadShare system, giving you access to over 2 million visitors a day, can generate leads for as little as $1 a lead.

The jury is still out as to whether this format will prove effective at generating leads, but I think it’s something you could test very easily.