No one wants to give a talk to an empty room. Promoting your talk and becoming known as someone who follows up after talks is a great way to make sure your talk doesn’t fall on deaf ears.
Today we are sharing four bits of information about your talk that are great to always have at hand.
Time and Location
Have you ever been to a conference with 5 million rooms all down random corridors? We have! Moreover, we’ve missed talks because we didn’t know which of the 5 million rooms to visit.
As soon as you know the room/building for the talk, store this somewhere safe along with the time of the talk. This way you can tweet / email / DM it out as and when required.
Times and locations are often subject to change on the day of a conference. Storing these details in one place means you can update corrections quickly before resharing.
Time and location snippets
TextExpander lets you instantly insert “snippets” of text as you type – using a quick search or abbreviation.
For example you could set up a TextExpander snippet so that when you type ;talktime in Twitter or your conference app it would return;
My talk on robot flower pickers will be at 10:30am in the main auditorium. See you there!
References
If your talk contains references from books or articles, then you can be sure that several days after your talk someone will ask you about “that book you mentioned.”
By storing your references somewhere within reach, you can quickly share this information.
If linking to a purchasable item, this would be a great time to consider using an affiliate code to make some money off your recommendation. Affiliate codes are a way for people selling a product to pay people who advertise the product. If they make a sale because of your link, you get a cut. So have a link ready to send out.
Reference snippets
If you have a favourite quote from a book you often reference, you could store it, ;gatsbyquote could become;
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
–– The Great Gatsby
Links to slides and videos
A link to the slides and recordings of your talk allows you to share with:
- The audience who wants to read over slides again
- People who couldn’t make it but wanted to
- People who only heard about the talk after it happened
- People who want to review your talk as part of a write-up
- People who want to promote the conference for next year
If you give the talk more than once you will find small improvements to the slides or how you present them.
Keeping this information in an easy to update place means you can always share the most refined version of the talk.
Linking to slides snippets
Using TextExpander we could have ;talklinks expand out to share the appropriate links for your talk;
The slides for my talk on robot flower pickers are here: https://robotflowerpickers.com/talk and if you want to see me up on stage the video is here: https://youtube.com/robotflowerpickers
Contact details for questions / follow up
Do you prefer to answer questions publicly or privately? If you don’t state how people should contact you, then you might not have much say in how you receive questions.
A typical pattern is to put some contact details at the end of your talk. This is great but assumes people will remember after the talk or that they were present to view the last slide.
Having a short sentence about how you like people to contact you that you can share all the places you promote the talk will help.
Contact details snippets
Contact details are an incredibly common use for TextExpander.
;contactpreference could show something such as:
If you have any questions, please email me@mysite.com or tweet @me
Both the email and twitter details should be snippets as well, so if you ever change your email address or twitter account you can update it in one place it have it reflected everywhere.
;email
me@mysite.com
;contactpage
https://mysite.com/contact
Pitching for the next talk
Sharing details about your talk before the talk will help to generate interest, and sharing links from the talk after will help people who missed out.
Now you have one talk under your belt, you might want to start pitching a similar talk to other conferences.
Using the same material you’ve been collecting for helping attendees you can pitch to conference organisers and businesses to get your message in front of more people.
Conclusion
When considered, a single talk can promote your ideas and your business far beyond the 20-minute spot you are given.
Having critical information to hand allows you to quickly and consistently promote and follow up about the talk.
What are some of your favourite talks that you didn’t attend in person? Let us know @TextExpander and on Facebook.
Comments and Discussion