HIRE ME TO SPEAK
HIRE ME TO SPEAK

Make your client look good

I write about strategies to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. I also share ways to use real-time strategies to spread ideas, influence minds, and build business.

Public Speaking  |  Case Studies  |  Personal branding  |  Brand Journalism  |  Best Practices

On the speaking circuit, the audiences I’ve addressed have suffered through some terrible introductions of me.

It’s a bummer for an audience, anticipating a keynote speaker, to suffer through a bumbled intro. It makes the people who organized the event look unprepared. And as a speaker it means I’ve got to pump up the energy, because I’m starting on an audience downer.

I’m sure you’ve been in the audience for such a thing. You know, a company executive wants the privilege of making the introduction of the keynote speaker. The event planner writes up a few paragraphs and because they are “busy,” the executive looks at it for the first time as they stroll to the podium. The executive then proceeds to mispronounce things and stumble over words. For example my middle name, Meerman, trips people up (it rhymes with “beer man)”.

While it is no fun for the executive to stumble on stage, I especially feel for the event planner. They have spent months organizing just the right program, picking speakers, and orchestrating the event minute-by-minute only to have the beginning flubbed.

So after having thought about this problem, I created a short introductory video that the event planner can choose to be played immediately prior to me walking out onto the stage.

Direct link to David Meerman Scott keynote speaker introduction on Vimeo

Make my client look good

My clients are the event planning committees that choose to hire me as a speaker. As I considered the trouble I frequently encounter with introductions, I realize that poor introductions make the event planners look bad. Well, I figured that’s a problem I might be able to solve.

The video saves the conference organizer from having to find someone to do the intro but I created it so that it is still possible to have someone talk about me prior to running the video. This is important because some conferences have sponsors for keynotes like mine and part of the sponsorship includes the opportunity to introduce me. The way this might work is the sponsor says something like: “I first read David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR five years ago and I learned...” In other words, the sponsor could still talk about my ideas and then immediately following that, the video introduces me.

Make your client look good

How about you? What small additional service can you provide for free to make your client look good?

Thanks to my speaker coach Nick Morgan and to Shana Bethune and Dave Jackel of Shave Media who worked with me on the video.