How to Get Out of the Audience and Onto the Stage

I'd love to see one or more of our "speaking veterans" put together a soup-to-nuts guide on how to speak at one of these events, from how to pitch the idea/ask to speak to what to expect when you arrive at the venue. What a tremendous resource that would be!

Someone wrote this comment in response to the last SpeakerWatch post about BlogOn, and thought I'd put down a few ideas on the topic. I didn't address "what to expect when you arrive at the venue", but that differs widely from conference to conference. I've had experiences ranging from 10 hours of prep with members of a panel which resulted in 10 minutes of talking, to not getting the conference address (no website!!) from the conference organizer until an hour before the talk, and then walking into a room of 300 people -- lawyers, before lunch. (One piece of advice: Never ever agree to do a talk for lawyers before they've eaten lunch.)

• Commit to being a public speaker I think that one reason you see the same speakers appearing at conferences over and over, is that there is a much publicized statistic that the #1 fear is the fear of public speaking -- and the people you see up there are among the few that have overcome this fear. Compound this with women's tendency to be self-critical and you have fewer women up at the podium. However, fear is not a good reason for avoiding the things you want to do. Start small. Practice speaking up whenever you are among a group of people. Do presentations to your boss and co-workers. Speak up at church. Speak up at PTA meetings. Get tongue-tied. Flub horribly. Recover. Flub again. Or take a course. I hear Toastmasters is great for speaker training. Becoming a confident speaker is not about eliminating mistakes and nervousness but about recovering gracefully from inevitable mistakes and nervousness.

• Research conferences and events. Figure out which conferences are best suited to your area of expertise. Subscribe to the conference mailing list to be informed of when they are accepting proposals. Find out what the conference organizers are interested in. Read papers from past conferences. Esther Dyson keeps a good list of tech conferences on her site. Wired magazine used to have a useful "junket" listing of upcoming tech events that was, unfortunately, discontinued. I don't know of any other lists, perhaps some misbehaving.net readers do?

• Network. Attend the conferences at which you'd like to speak. Talk with everyone at the conference that you can. Listen a lot. Seek out some of the conference's past speakers who share your area of interest. Engage them in dialogue on their weblogs and in other forums they frequent. Get to know the other players in your field, what their perspective is, where you agree and disagree with them. Publish your own weblog.

• Submit a Proposal. Unless you are already fairly well-known in your field, this is the best way to get your first speaking gig. Many conferences, such as Emerging Tech, explicitly accept proposals, while also seeking out speakers themselves. Others, such as Poptech and Supernova, do their own speaker selection. This does not mean, however, that they are not looking for speakers they don't already know about. Email the event's producer, say that you are proposing yourself as a speaker, give a brief outline of who you are, what your area of expertise is, and what you have to offer their audience. Keep this short, and offer to provide a longer proposal later if they are interested.

• Be Brilliant, Fascinating or Funny From the vantage point of conference organizers, good speakers enlighten, entertain, provoke or educate. They provide the audience with information they can use in their business, a stimulating idea, good soundbytes, and the occasional laugh. So once you get the gig, work hard on your talk. Practice it. Then break a leg. Once you've established yourself as a person who can provide these things, you will get reinvited and reinvited and reinvited. I think conferences are looking for more women speakers, as some Misbehaving.net commenters have pointed out. Indeed, Susan Mernit from BlogOn said more women had been invited than had been able to speak.

• Stay on the Radar. Once you've given your talk, solicit follow-up from colleagues. Improve your talk (a lot of speakers give one talk at several venues). Continue participating in conferences, online forums, publishing a weblog, being engaged. If all this seems like a big commitment, it is. But the payoff -- in terms of personal satisfaction, the esteem of your peers and building your career -- is huge. And the more women out there in the world, in the public eye and up on the podium, the better it is for all of us.