So What? Getting back on stage

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on getting back on stage. We walk through being mentally prepared, getting your slide deck ready for a live show, and protips from people who’ve already done live shows this year. Catch the replay here:

So What? Getting back on stage

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In this episode you’ll learn:

best practices in data presentations
being mentally ready for in-person keynotes
tips to keep the audience engaged after the show

Upcoming Episodes:

Measuring your content – 7/29/2021

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/insights/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:26
Well, Happy Thursday, everyone, welcome to so wet the marketing analytics and insights live show brought to you every Thursday at 1pm. Eastern. I’m joined by John and Chris and this week we are talking about so what? Getting back on stage. So we’re talking about this because that’s what people are doing ourselves included. John was actually in Napa Valley last week, when we were recording last week’s live stream. Because he was getting back on stage. And Chris and I have both done some virtual event events recently, I did a four hour workshop yesterday for women in analytics. And Chris, you did an event last night as well.

Christopher Penn 1:05
That’s right, the digit market event.

Katie Robbert 1:08
So what we want to do is talk a little bit about how can you prepare to get back on stage because some of us all of us are a little bit out of practice. So we wanted to sort of go back to our roots of you know, what makes a good presentation when you’re giving a talk on stage? Or what are some of the things that you need to know, to keep the audience engaged. So for example, I spoke to a camera and a bunch of people who were not on video yesterday for four hours, and so I couldn’t feed off of the energy, I didn’t know how well things were going because I was getting no feedback. And so just we’ll be talking about how to keep that energy up, even if you’re giving it to basically a blank wall. So, John, do you wanna talk a little bit about your experience, since you were the first of the three of us to venture back out into the world, including getting on a plane?

John Wall 2:01
Yes, traveling in the real world, it was an amazing thing. The Christie huge news is I had gotten TSA precheck, just prior to everything closing down. So this was the first flight where I was actually able to take advantage of that. And so yeah, for anybody that travels and does keynotes, you, you must get that done, that’s just unbelievable, to walk square through security and not have to deal with anything. So that was huge. And that, yeah, that you the biggest thing is that, you know, just being thankful for getting back on stage, because you get that immediate feedback. You know, there were it was the social media, excuse me, the multifamily social media summit. So these are all attendees that have, you know, apartment complexes have 10 properties each with 400 units, so they have full on social media staff, trying to get, you know, tenants and keep these places at full capacity. And, yeah, you know, that’s the, the real win is just the fact that I finally had a chance to go through the deck and as you’re presenting, you can just tell and get a feel for which of the case studies are not. For us, it’s all about, we go too far, and we get people confused, you know, we, you know, you can dig in and talk a little bit about, Okay, so here’s how we find influencers. And that data is real simple and straightforward, because it shows a list of the folks who are the best. And, you know, the kind of crowd goes with you. But when I go further in the deck, and we get into data clustering for SEO, and, you know, ranking search terms on four or five variables and doing three dimensional graphs, like, especially this show, because it was in Napa, basically everybody had been completely drunk the night before. And they were only at like, half mental capacity is that was, so they’re, you know, their eyes are glazing over. And they started to get lost there. And, and so at that point, I was just like, okay, we’re gonna shave, you know, 4050 seconds out of this at each slide and move it along and go. So yeah, that that having that live feedback is, is huge. But the real, the big thing is, this is your chance to go back to your deck and go through and prune and clean up and really make sure that you’re on message and everything works. Because you you know, for the first time you have fresh eyes on it. I mean, we’ve we have all done our five views, you know, five tactical applications of AI for marketing programs. And you know, after you’ve done it like the seventh or eighth time inside of five or six months, you’re really not even paying attention to it anymore. And so this was a chance to refresh the whole deck. And so yeah, you know, go through the whole set of slides, make sure you’ve got all your talking points straight and reevaluate everything I know there was so much stuff in the deck that was a year and a half old that needed to be updated. Like the big one for this deck was there was a lot of talk about how there’s so much data out there across so many different platforms. And now the changes that with all the privacy stuff that’s happened in the past six months, like all those doors are slamming shut so I had to adjust and and tweak all that stuff, you know, before we got live to go but yeah, there’s a ton of stuff going on. And it’s just a great opportunity to go back and clean things up and, and get over the jitters that’s really the thing. I noticed it was strange I, I even said straight up front, like I work with folks who are data mavens, you know, these are people, we always want to find out what’s going on. And so I surveyed the group as I started, how many people are freaked out just to be here, you know, to be out of your house. And it was interesting. It was only about 20%, I was surprised I really felt the peer pressure of people not wanting to raise their hands and admit that, you know, that they kind of didn’t want to get into that or go near that. So that was interesting. And another interesting data point two was just like masks with, you know, I’ve asked for it like 5%, I would say in amongst the attendees, and on the floor, people are just like, no, we’re vaccinated. So we’re, we’re not going to bother. And the other extreme, the airport is, you know, no, you must wear a mask as soon as you get to the airport, and you wear it the entire time until you’re off your flight and gone. So, yeah, it’s interesting to, you know, kind of all the stuff that has gone into the first trip back. But, yeah, it was a great experience overall.

Katie Robbert 6:05
Well, we are very happy that you survived, and that you were successful. And, you know, you bring up an interesting point, you know, so I think, you know, with everything being remote for the past 18 or so months, you know, a lot of companies have pivoted to webinars. And so giving a webinar is quite a bit different from actually giving a presentation live on a stage. And so I just want to touch on that a little bit. Because one might say, well, I’ve been giving webinars for the past 18 months, how is it different getting on a stage, and a lot of that is, you know, getting reactions from the audience, or even just sort of seeing people in faces to see if like your jokes, or your data points or your slides or landing with a webinar, a lot of times, it’s pre recorded. So you’re just reading from a script, when you’re on stage, you, it’s discouraged for you to be reading from a script, you should have things pretty much memorized, you’re just sort of know the gist of the outline of what you’re going to say. So there’s a big difference there. And then, you know, if, you know, you can’t necessarily on a webinar, go back to something because again, you’re not getting that feedback of something that people don’t understand. And at a live show, someone can ask a question and be like, hey, you talked about this thing, and I don’t really know what that meant. Can we go back and sort of read, discuss and you can pivot? Live, you can do that with some webinars, but I feel like not all webinars. So you know, Chris, you do the most speaking of the three of us, you know, what’s your experience been like? And, you know, where do you think people should start in terms of getting ready to get back on stage?

Christopher Penn 7:35
It’s interesting, one of the things that I pivoted to immediately when the pandemic began is, and we do this on things like live streams and podcast to is changed our mindset about who we’re speaking to, when we’re doing something like this. I’m talking really to you right, when I’m recording a podcast, there’s one person listening, right? It’s, it’s rare for people to gather to listen to a podcast, it’s rare for people to gather to watch a webinar, right? It really is like a one to one form of communication. And so our, the way we speak, changes, like the the type of interaction we’re having now, the type of interaction you and I have when we’re recording In-Ear Insights is very much a true conversation. One person talking to one person, when you’re on stage. There are multiple people like his SWOT his pet peeves, whatever podcast was, Hey, everybody quit talking to it’s just me. Was this everybody? You guys listener? But on stage, there isn’t everybody, it’s five people in the room. It’s it’s a group of people. And so you have to change to some degree, how you speak to those people to say, you know, Hey, everyone, right? Because there’s you and you and you, and you there, and I see you there back there playing Galaga. It’s Thank you. Sounds like comics don’t. Exactly. But how we address an audience does change, not only just the feedback, but just in terms of acknowledging the situation that the audience member is in. And that’s a part that you know, that that’s universal marketing, understanding when you write an email newsletter to somebody if you don’t address to, Hey, you guys, or Hey, everybody, it’s one person’s reading thing, so is a letter from you to that person. So as speakers, we have to keep in mind what the experience of the audience is, and try and be as audience centric as possible. And it’s tough. I know early on in my speaking career, I did a terrible job. Because I was so focused on myself that I could not put myself in the position the audience members, you know, seeing from their seat. What does this look like from from the audience? How does this sound one of the most valuable things you can do as a speaker And I would strongly suggest that you do this, when you get back out on the road is set up a camera, and video yourself speaking ideally set it up. So there’s enough of the audience like he was just like no heads, you know, on the bottom, like Mystery Science Theater, to be able to get a little bit of audience reaction, but watch yourself on stage and see what are the things you do that as an audience member could bother you, you know, are there things that you have, like verbal tics? Like do you say, um, or, you know, or, like, all the time in the speeches that litter your, your public speaking voice? It’s okay, in a conversation. It’s okay. Like, if you and I are talking music? Yeah, I don’t know. But on stage, there’s a different expectation. And so we have to, please video yourself. When you rehearse, turn on a webinar platform and just video yourself speaking and see what it looks like, see how you sound. You may find some things like, Oh, yeah, I constantly do that thing. I didn’t even know I did that thing. The other fun thing to do is replay the video at like 8x speed, because you’ll see, look, ticks that show up in when it’s highly compressed that you don’t see it at normal speeds like, oh, why do I keep doing that thing all the time? Like, what? What is that?

Katie Robbert 11:18
So it’s interesting that you bring up that specific thing. I so yesterday, as I mentioned, I gave a workshop. And so I was virtual, but everybody else was in person. So they were sitting in a room together, watching the workshop. And when I was preparing, I was thinking through a lot of those tics that I know that I have. And I made sure that I like had my hair like tied down, pulled back shellacked, whatever you want to say. So that it wasn’t a distraction to me, because as soon as I sort of feel that tickle, I’m immediately like brushing my hair back and brushing my hair back and brushing my hair back. And I didn’t want that to be my first reintroduction to a live audience where I was constantly playing with my hair and fixing my hair and my glasses and this and that. And so I was very aware of what I do. When I’m thinking like I still gesticulate wildly with my hands, I’m never gonna stop doing that. It’s just how I talk. It’s what it is. But I didn’t want there to be those verbal, like those physical tics of like, I have to play with my hair, I have to play with my hair. So it’s, you know, it’s definitely as people are getting used to being in front of other people, you’re absolutely right, being aware of what you do. Something that always makes me nuts when people are giving talks is standing directly in front of the slides. So you have the slides projected behind you. And on a webinar, you’re off to the side, you know, you’re that little video box off to the side, at a live setting, you can walk, you know, in front of your slides, you can walk on the other side of the stage. And sometimes people just stand right in front of the slide. So if you’re trying to take a picture of what’s going on, you’re just getting the speaker cutting off the slide. And so being aware of where you are physically, do you pace do you stand still, you know, how natural Do you look? Are you aware of how big the stages You know, it actually reminds me when we were joking last week, John, before you were about to go on the plane, you were like I need to wear my shoes to see if they are going to fall apart or not. And a lot of us haven’t worn proper shoes other than like flip flops or sandals or sneakers in a very long time. So all of those palaces that we’ve built up on our feet for our nice dress shoes are completely gone. So you probably want to wear them around the house for a little bit before you road test them like on stage for the first time. So you’re not limping around with a lot of sores on your feet.

John Wall 13:50
Yeah, bloody feet is part of it. And another thing with that too, though, is your take that right to dry run on herstal rehearsal. It’s still so great. You know, when you get to the room, check out the AV because at this session today they had they actually took my entire deck and they projected it through the projector. So I was given a clicker that was a house clicker. But so I had to adjust on the fly because I’m used to being able to drive from my own machine so that I can see additional notes and stuff on my screen. So I ended up actually, I was finger gun in it with two clickers at the same time to keep myself on track. Yeah, I was totally doing the wild wild west review. And you know, and that’s why I wanted to ask you guys about that too. Because I have this thing I have the roaming Tiger thing like once the presentation starts I’m all over the stage because I like to go to different parts of the room and feel people you know different, be able to talk to everyone closer at some point during the presentation and be able to handle questions. But some people find that distracting too as far as moving around too much. So I don’t know Do you guys have a approach on that you know, what you prefer to see and what you prefer to do?

Katie Robbert 15:00
You know, I think if you’re conscious, you know, I I to Chris’s point, unless you have videoed yourself, you might not know that you do it. Um, I tend to stand in one place. But again, I gesticulate wildly with my arm. So it sort of looks like I’m covering the whole stage. But yeah, I tend to stand roughly in one place, maybe pace around like a little bit just because my feet get tired. But I’m not, like you said like a wild cat stocking the stage.

Christopher Penn 15:30
I used to wander around a lot on stage until I read Michael portes book, steal the show. And he’s a theater and movie trained actor. And one of the things he was saying is that, if your movements on stage are not intentional, they’re distracting. But it’s okay to use movement that coincides with what you’re talking about. So, in one of the talks that we do, on building a data driven customer journey, there’s five stages to building a company’s data driven, customer driven, there’s It looks like a staircase on the slide. And so there’s what’s called blocking, which is where you stand, and you essentially move left to right, taking a step with each stage so that your movement is in sync with the visual behind you, that says, you know, you can see his logical progression, then you reset to where your next point is, to break myself of that habit of pacing too much, because it was a lot. And you know, to the point where like, at some point, I was eventually going to fall off the stage if I didn’t. Laura Gassner Otting told me practice in your rehearsals standing on a chair, you can’t go anywhere, you can still turn and face and address different parts of the audience. So you do there is a rhythm to that like focusing on parts of the room by design. But by standing on a chair, you can’t really go anywhere without injuring yourself. So it’s a really good if you if you feel like when you watch the replay of yourself up, if you look like you just go back and forth, like the flash stage, then you probably should try the chair thing and see, okay, does this make a difference? It’s hard. If you’re used to pacing, it’s hard to figure out how to sort of settle down that energy. But once you do, it removes a lot of distraction. And as a side benefit, if you are shooting video from like your phone or whatever onstage, it’s a lot easier to get a good shot because you’re not constantly wandering in and out to the edges of your phone frame. So you plant them device, you say, this is where I’m gonna stand. And you catch it. And as long as you didn’t get your little camera step said this is it. And that’s where I’m going to be and then you can get a much better video out of the event. Oh, yeah, John Wall, I was just,

John Wall 17:33
I need to chime in here being an expert on videoing speakers. I have a

Katie Robbert 17:39
lot of talks, and no one will ever see them.

John Wall 17:42
I have a I have an uninterrupted record of about 10 Trust Insights, keynote fails. favorite one was when I caught Chris at Talkwalker. And it was the camera had flipped into time lapse mode. And I didn’t mean it. So you could watch Chris’s whole 40 minute presentation and like two minutes and 30 seconds. It was just like it was the running around like crazy. But yeah, that is you bring up a great point in that blocking is the key to that, you know, especially for that digital customer journey slide because that’s one of the slides where it’s so complicated, just you moving along and being able to say, look at this stage here, this stage here that totally does, Paul. But I wanted to go back to Katie, as far as so you did for our virtual session, which is just completely glutton for punishment. What kind of stuff Were you able to do to hold, you know, folks engaged and kind of keep it moving? Because you didn’t have that in the room? Kind of let’s break for water, coffee and real questions.

Katie Robbert 18:39
You know, it was, I’ll be honest, it was challenging, but at the end of it, I was exhausted and I went to bed last night with a super really bad sore throat from talking for four hours, I still have it. I’m I’m a natural introvert. And so in order to do something like that, especially for four hours, you really have to, you know, smile when you’re talking force yourself to smile, when you’re talking to really sort of bring the energy you have to make sure that your posture is such that you feel like you’re sitting up straight and really being like, you know, I guess basically what I’m trying to say is you have to if your natural energy is it like a six, you have to bring it up to a 15 and keep pushing yourself to keep that energy up there, especially if you don’t have any sort of reaction to feed off of to be to know if you’re doing well. So I actually built in, John, you gave me this really good tip that helped me tremendously, not only to slow down but to give me an opportunity to breathe recollect myself and drink some water while I was speaking, but I gave myself little visual cues on you know, every like five or six slides, and it was just this little.in the corner of a slide. And that was my visual reminder. Like Okay, let me pause here. Does anyone have any questions? I’m going to Take a sip of water, you know, do want me to go back to anything that I’ve been talking about. And it was a pretty quiet room. You know, there was I knew that people were there, I knew they weren’t just like, you know, not paying attention. I knew that, you know, they had shown up for a reason. But I don’t think it was a group that was confident to ask questions in real time. Or maybe it was just a lot of information. And they didn’t know what the questions were. So I still wasn’t getting that feedback. And so what I did, and you know, I give both of you a lot of credit for really helping me prepare you both individually went through the deck with me while I walk through is I was able to, you know, have questions ready, basically. So you know, how on webinars, they’re like, Oh, can you send us like three or four questions, like seed questions or, you know, plant questions. And so with that, I made sure that I did that and be like, Well, okay, so one question that I typically have, when I think about this kind of thing is this. And so you know, even if nobody else was going to participate in some ways, I was participating with myself, I was playing two roles, I was the host of the thing, but I was also an audience member, feeding myself information and giving myself energy and participating. And it’s, it’s a lot of work, I’m still kind of tired from it. But it’s, you have to prepare for something like that, because you can’t rely on the audience to give you that kind of energy or feedback.

Christopher Penn 21:32
One of the other things that we have to remember too, is what we’ve been doing, we’ve had a certain level of visual clarity that we’ve enjoyed for last 18 months, it goes away at an in person event. So this is an example of a customer journey analysis map, right? This is readable, if you’re sitting at your desk, right? This is not so readable. When you’re 40 feet away from it, you know, in row 36 of the audience. And it’s, it’s a much more difficult thing to see. So as you’re starting to design things, like slides and stuff, you may want to switch to simpler visualizations, make stuff bigger, make text more obvious, because it can be very, very challenging to have things that we’re used to having like your webinar, you can you can leave closer to the screen, you can lean closer as an audience member, but probably shouldn’t, the person in front of you will not be happy with you. So as we look at all of our slides, we have to go back to and remember that slides are supplemental to our talk, they aren’t they are not the talk themselves, right? It’s perfectly okay, just have a big bold visual of some kind, that doesn’t stand on its own. It doesn’t have to because you are there as the speaker to provide the context. So you know, this is a picture of a CVS receipt, this is from our dashboard Soc. And the narrative that goes with this is to say like that top part there is the relevant information. That’s what I bought at CVS, that bottom part is all the crap that they add onto it. And so when you’re building dashboards, and when you’re building slides for presentations, what is essential? And then what can you get rid of? What John was saying earlier about that? Going through back through your slides? Yeah, go back to the slides, say, okay, are there things in my slide deck that I don’t need, like on this slide here, all those sub bullet points, I’ll probably get rid of them, because I don’t need them there. And they’re very difficult to read when you’re far away. You know, we’re trying to reduce things down just basic shapes. Having visuals like this are, are much easier for people to process, then, than something that looks like that.

Katie Robbert 23:42
You know, it’s interesting, because this and you guys know, it’s something that I’ve struggled with, because I came from a more academic background. And so when I was, you know, learning to put slide decks together, slide decks, in academia look very different from what we’re talking about. So basically, the goal of the deck was that you wouldn’t need somebody to narrate the slides in order to know what’s happening. So every slide had multiple bullet points and context and information. And, you know, they were, you know, going to be passed around, you know, different stakeholders, and everybody was going to read this slide deck and get up to speed. Whereas when you get on stage, your slides, because to your point, don’t necessarily need to have all that context, because you are there as a speaker, providing context, and I still struggle with that a bit because I still feel like if someone was reading this deck without me narrating it, would they know what the heck is going on? And the answer is no, because you need that person speaking to it in order to understand it. You know, you were talking about, you know, webinars and the readability. You can’t pause, a live talk unless it’s being recorded and you watch it after the fact. You probably have a video of a webinar and you can pause and zoom in. But you’re absolutely right, Chris, you know, a lot of those slides, even if it’s not data, if you’re putting, like everything, you know, like a fourth of July explosion on it, people are so focused on trying to figure out what the heck it is they’re looking at, that they’re, that they’ve stopped listening to you and what you’re saying. And then so this might be the critical point in your talk, when you’re giving them that million dollar piece of advice. But they’re so distracted by trying to figure out the abstract art that’s on your slide that you’ve completely done yourself a disservice of, you know, getting the audience to be like, yeah, that’s what I want to hire. That’s what I want to do.

Christopher Penn 25:42
Yep, there’s, I think it was Nancy Duarte, or, or maybe someone else but in, there’s a number of books that essentially say, when you’re delivering presentations, there’s three things. There’s the speaker, who is the conduit of information, they’re the slides, which are the visual reinforcement, and then there’s the handout, which contains a lot of the supplementary materials, the bullet points and all that stuff. And if you want to a balanced presentation, you have all three. Now as a speaker, for marketing purposes, it’s actually a really good way to go because the handout becomes the download, like if you want all the supplementary materials go to where can I get the slides calm, right, and encourage people to download the thing there, so that they get the benefit of it. Now one other thing that’s really important that we don’t do nearly enough of in conferences, but we have had the luxury of doing a pandemic is the fact that conference software like web, you know, Google meat and stuff like that has closed captioning built in. So it’s, it is accessible for people with disabilities. That’s not as easy at conferences and trade shows. So one of the things that I certainly want to be experimenting within the next year or so is what would it look like to have live transcription software running that could then be streamed, so somebody if they want, if they had a disability, or they just want to read along, could actually see what’s being transcribed. So there’s a little microphone widget here is called a sandstone that just transmits audio to my phone. And we use a software like otter, the AI based transcription software, and you can actually have share a link to a live auto transcript as it’s occurring. So one thing that that I think it’d be worth trying at a talk, you know, going forward is, yeah, you if you copy and paste this link, you can read along, and then go back and listen afterwards. And if I’m sharing it as the speaker, then obviously, I’m giving you permission to get an audio copy of the recording. But yeah, a lot of folks with differential differential abled folks have had more accommodation during the pandemic, because of the necessity of accessibility software and conference offered than they do in real life.

John Wall 27:55
You just glossed over but I really want to hammer this home, this is like special value to folks that are on live here. The Where can I get the slides comm is huge. If you have that in your deck, and that goes up, we’ve had shows where we get 20 or 30 leads come in, within an hour or two of the show, you know, we find out who in the audience is interested. And so instead of, you know, hoping and praying that they follow up with you in the coming week, or they read the email, you send them when every other vendor on the show is going to be sending 35 emails, you just cannot beat that to cut through the clutter.

Katie Robbert 28:26
Yeah, I should point out that that’s our URL. Yes, that we own that. You need your own cool phrase. But I think that that’s a really important point is, you know, the nice thing with a webinar is, it’s already built online. And so you have, you know, a website to point to you have a URL to point to with a live show. As you’re on stage, you don’t necessarily have that. So you need to make sure that you’re remembering very easy and simple calls to action. So if our call to action was, now if you want to learn more about us go to Trust insights.ai slash YouTube slash contact slash, subscribe slash 12345 slash 987 slash John, no one’s ever going to remember that. So give yourself a little bit of a leg up and create some kind of a vanity URL. And so what John just mentioned, is a vanity URL that we’ve created that redirects back to our website. We make sure we update the landing page and the deck itself, with whatever you know, is being promoted at that time and to that. So one of the things that we were doing beforehand, and if you’re new to speaking, this might be you know, a new piece of advice for you is, whenever we knew we were going to get on stage, you have to be sort of prepared for the worst. And so what we would do is we would pre record the session going through the site. So if I’m doing, you know, a 15 minute talk on change management, and I’m going to be doing it live on stage, probably the week or maybe a few days before I’m going to sit down at my computer and record myself going through that talk for a couple of reasons, one, so that I can have it ready up on our website immediately when the talk is finished. So if people want to go get it, then I’m not waiting on the conference to send me the video and the recording, and then I can put it up, people have forgotten about it, because the second they walk out of that room, they’re on to the food trucks, they’re on to the next talk. They’re on to like, catch up their friends, they’ve already forgotten about you. The other thing is, tech goes wrong. I mean, John knows this firsthand as he’s trying to record things. But in the event that like all of the you know, microphones go out, or the slides don’t work, you already have a video recorded of your talk that you can give to your audience. So they don’t walk away going, Hey, I paid, you know, 150 bucks to go say, See Chris speak, and I didn’t get anything? Well, actually, no, you got the whole talk in a video that you can keep referring back to. And so making sure you’re doing that prep work ahead of time, in the event something goes wrong, or to have it immediately available for your audience afterwards, it’s going to go a long way with webinars that’s already baked in. So it’s, you know, you don’t have to think about that with live talks you do.

Christopher Penn 31:16
Yep. And the other thing I’ll add on and this is a, I think, was probably the first time we’ve ever shown this publicly, so this is the machinery behind where can I get the slides. And what this does, is you’ll notice there’s the landing page here, which is no John’s talk. But then there’s the source, medium and campaign. So as people use that vanity URL, it’s pushing data programmatically into Google Analytics, saying this URL was accessed, which means that we can track and give attribution to speaking on stage, right? So it’s not just Hey, people went and got the thing. No, it’s, we know exactly the source, the medium and name of the campaign. So like, this is John’s event near the multifamily Napa 2021. That’s the actual campaign that will show up in Google Analytics. So in doing this, if you it’s convenient for the audience, right, they can get the slides easily. It’s convenient for you because you don’t have to remember some crazy long URL, but it gives you the marketing attribution, you need to be able to justify, here’s how speaking is impacting our business, here’s the what it looks like in our web analytics. If you do this, I would strongly encourage you to do something similar. With your work with your corporate IT team or your marketing tech team, to build this kind of measurement into something as simple as get helping people get the slides for your talk, you will you will dramatically improve your attribution for speaking.

Katie Robbert 32:42
Yeah, I think, you know, so as we’re sort of going through all the do’s and don’ts, you know, I, I can’t stress enough sort of what we’ve been talking about is that beforehand, preparation, and so I can speak from my own experience. You know, I haven’t been speaking publicly that long, only for a couple of years, as compared to, you know, both of you who’ve been doing it a lot longer than I have. And the very first time I got on stage, I had rehearsed my talk so much, I was giving that talk in the shower, I could give that talk it using different accents. My husband was so tired of listening to me, just suddenly burst into sort of almost like showtunes be like, Hey, did you know and I would just start to give the talk. And he was like, Oh, my God, just please stop. But I knew it so well, that I wasn’t, you know, trying to anticipate what slide is going to come next I could do the talk without the slides in case the tech failed. But also, it gave me the opportunity to relax a little bit and feel like I could focus a little bit more on my stage presence versus the information that I was trying to convey. Because once you get up on stage, even if you’re a seasoned pro, the nerves do kick in. And it’s a very different experience from giving a webinar sitting at your desk in your home. Being up on stage, there’s a reason there’s a whole, you know, set of classes around public speaking, it can be a very nerve wracking thing. And so the more rehearsed you are, the more you give the talk to your co founders, and you know, they have to listen to you talk about this slide deck over and over and over again. And they do it, you know, graciously, even though inside they’re like, I’m tired of hearing about this talk. You as the speaker are way more prepared, and it will give the audience a better experience overall.

Christopher Penn 34:37
Exactly the more mental bandwidth you have available to you, the more you can watch the audience.

John Wall 34:42
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Some people think that people speak off the cuff but the reality is, it’s so rehearsed, that they’re able to make it look like it’s off the cuff. That’s the way it goes. If people are interested in that Tamsin Webster is an expert on getting your you know, your presentations tight and on a single message. She’s got her new book, find your red thread, which covers a lot of the stuff that I’d recommend that to anybody that wants to read more.

Christopher Penn 35:07
Yeah, one thing I like to keep from the pandemic, though I was looking back at this is when the pandemic began, a lot of public speakers found themselves in an interesting pickle, because they give the same talk over and over again, right to your point, Katie, they give, if you see Chris Penn at ad content marketing world, it’s probably going to be a similar talk to what you saw it social media, marketing, road, inbound, so on so forth. And that’s fine when you’re geographically separated, because the same person is probably not going to all these conferences, then sitting in the exact same talk all the time, when we all went to webinars, it’s like, okay, every webinar is the exact same person’s gave the exact same thing, and suddenly became a lot more challenging for people who are professional public speakers, that’s like, their main income to do that. And so what’s happened is, I was looking at my own catalog, we’ve covered like 15, brand new talks, during the last 18 months stuff that, you know, some parts of it are, you know, so familiar, but there’s a whole bunch of brand new stuff that haven’t done before, things like, you know, the bias in AI and machine learning talk is example, measurement of public relations. And so I hope that we keep that, as we go back to what we’re doing is, we continue to have new new stuff, new material, and not just a little bit, but like substantially new material, so that audiences can get very different things from us. You know, not just the the one talk because the one talk is fine, but having that many, that much more stuff in your, in your stable on your shelf, gives you the ability to, to appeal to many more audiences, different audiences, and possibly improve you as a speaker, because you have to be expert in that much more stuff.

Katie Robbert 36:51
I would say similar to that, you know, I haven’t developed 18 or 15 new talks, but I did come up with more of a core talk that I feel comfortable giving. But what I can do with that is I can create different versions of it based on the context. So I’m not rebuilding my talk every single time. I’m taking the same foundational talk and I’m saying, Okay, now I can apply it to content marketers. Now I can apply it to marketing and AI. Now I can apply it to this and that the other so I tried to build it in such a way that it would be flexible enough to give to those different audiences. So that chrystia point, I’m not, I’m not just giving the same talk over and over again, but I’m changing it and adapting it to the type of audience.

Christopher Penn 37:40
Okay, exactly. Yeah. Jay Baer did that very successfully with his book utility, which is a fantastic read, even though it’s seven years old, still relevant. But then he had utility for real estate utility for this utility for every vertical and, you know, just tweaks just enough to be relevant to that audience, but really, a masterclass in how do you adapt your content as a speaker to your different audiences?

Katie Robbert 38:03
Exactly. Well, gentlemen, any other final pro tips or learnings, you know, for our audience, before we wrap up today,

John Wall 38:16
shout out to Christine. She likes to planted questions. And I hate to say, I never go into a webinar without a couple people ready to ask questions. So that you know, unfortunately, it’s a little PT Barnum, but that’s the kind of thing you want to do. And, and the same thing, another thing with webinar recordings is use the survey software, you would be astounded at what people will answer in webinar surveys because their defenses are down. You know, they’ll talk about budget, they’ll talk about what products they’re looking at. So yeah, another just quick tip on that. But that’s it, use the tools you’ve got in hand in practice, practice, practice.

Christopher Penn 38:50
Yeah, and wear a mask, please if you’re going to be in person.

Katie Robbert 38:55
And I would say with that friendly reminder, myself and Chris and John are all available to speak at your next event. So if you want to contact us Trust Insights, or AI slash contact, we are all professional speakers, we are happy to come speak to your audience and we’ll tailor our talks to whatever industry or vertical you are in.

John Wall 39:13
And I’ll destroy the video for it guaranteed.

Christopher Penn 39:20
By folks, see you next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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