Five Ways Meeting Planners Optimize Their Speakers’ Value

As a full-time paid speaker, I offer these six proven suggestions for meeting planners to optimize to value and visibility of the speaker—for their attendees and for the speaker:
1. After you hire a speaker, ask that presenter to submit three actionable tips, with titles (under 100 words each, with embedded links) that they will offer in their presentation + 2-sentence bio with link to where attendees can learn more tips from that speaker. Then create a valuable conference souvenir that you mail to attendees as they are leaving the conference: an eBooklet of all speakers’ tips + Who Else Contributed to the Success of Our Conference—a list of the conference committee members and others.

2. Strengthen the connective thematic thread of your conference by sending all speakers the collective list of speakers’ tips and ask them to refer to at least one tips from another speaker where that tip relates to their topic too.

3. During the conference ask each speaker to create e one-minute video tips, with explanatory text titles using the free app Gloopt and their iPhone—and to include the hashtag for the conference in each video and suggest that they share them socially whilst at the conference—thus boosting the value and visibility of the conference, ideas at the conference and the speakers.

4. Also invite attendees, in advance of the conference, to download the free app so that during the conference they can use their iPhone to ask each other, “What’s one tip that you have heard at (name of conference) and from who?” Attendees might cite a speaker or exhibitor or other attendee from whom they learned something helpful. In so doing 4 people get bragging rights that can spur them to share these videos: the interviewee, the person interviewed, the person cited and you the meeting planner.

5. When attendees sign up to come, ask them to “By (X date) please send us the name of a book that helped you in your work last year, even if it does not seem to directly relate to your work. When you do you will get a peek preview of what your colleagues thought and we will have the top ten most cited books on display at the conference with the names of the people who cited them. When you receive responses, do two things:
Send the respondents PDF that reinforces the value of their attendee, with some exciting news + three alphabetical lists: List of attendees, followed by the book title they submitted; list of books, followed by the name of the attendee(s) who submitted them AND a list of the Attendees’ Top Ten Favorite, Most Relevant Books. Get 10 copies of each book from the publisher—for free—by telling them that you will display them throughout the conference then give them away, from the stage, to attendees you want to honor.