8.55 a.m., the room is fully packed and the audience is waiting in anticipation. The conference is about to kick-off with the keynote speech, held by a well-known expert in his field. Many of the people in the audience have come from away and paid a high price to see him live and to be part of an inspiring day full of interesting topics. He steps on stage and starts to talk. The first sentences fill the room and all of sudden the audience seems to freeze.
What’s that? Is he really reading his words one by one from a script? No, this can’t be true. But it is!
Instead of an inspiring talk all he does is holding a lecture, and a very boring one indeed. It doesn’t take long until the first people start to fumble around on their smartphones, typing messages on their social media profiles. Just a few seconds later, these messages pop up on the large twitter wall for all (around 450) people in the room (and everybody on twitter) to see. And they state what everybody in the room is thinking.
- “This years keynote speech is a keynote read. What a start?!” #fail
- “I just thought, I heard my grandpa reading fairy tales? But I never paid him 500 Euros.” #iwantmymoneyback
- “If I want to read a book, I’ll buy a book.” #cheaper
- And so on…
Pay money to receive pain?
I must admit, that this example is a pretty extreme one, that rarely happened to me. But I have experienced a lot of similar presentations at several occasions & conferences in the last couple of years. In most cases the presenters read their slides out loud, which doesn’t make a big difference to reading from a script.
Reading slides is not presenting
And if people want to read from slides, there are cheaper ways to do so.
How do people react to that kind of “lecture”? The results are always the same. Attention drops to a minimum and the presentation mutates from gain to a real pain. But if you pay a lot of money to attend a conference, you don’t want to sit through painfully boring presentations, right? And from an event organizers point of view, I am pretty sure, the last things they want people to remember from their events are pain and boredom.
Being an expert does not make you a good presenter
So why do such things happen again and again? I guess, because event organizers only check the expertise of their speakers. But being an expert doesn’t make him/her a good speaker/presenter. So why do event organizers not check the presentation (slide design) skills of their speakers?
I have no idea!
Quality management for event organizers
Let’s face it – speakers are the main assets of any conference. Their heads are on any piece of marketing deliverable. From website to social media, from brochures to PR kits. Speakers are the lead magnet for the event. And you don’t check the quality of your main assets? Why?
If you hire a catering company, you try the food before you buy. There’s a technic check for all the technical equipment. Before you buy a new car, you take it for a test ride. Why not asking your speakers for a test ride – in public speaking and/or slide design?
Stakes are high for both. But I guess there is a lot more at stake for the event organizer. If a speaker is really bad, he won’t get a lot of future invitations to speak. Unless he’s a professional speaker, this will not harm his business. But if the feedback about the “bad quality of speeches” of an event gets viral, this could kill the credibility of the event and the organizers and lead to economic ruin – in worst case.
Reputation
Nobody wants to ruin his business with bad products, right? So I tried to find out, what event organizers think about that issue. The outcome pretty much confirmed the thoughts I had in mind.
Although all organizers focus on building a good reputation, none of them had a quality management in place, checking the quality of their main assets. Why? Because most of them said, that “the expertise of a speaker” stands for itself. “And, it is not possible to ask a well-known expert for a test-ride.”
Conclusion
I completely disagree!
As a production company you are fully responsible for the quality of your products. If you outsource production, it’s still you, who’s responsible. As an event organizer, the speakers are the main parts of your product. If you don’t check their quality upfront, you are fully responsible, if the end product is of bad quality.
Dear event organizers!
If you want to put your reputation & business at risk, go on like you did in the past. But, if you want to make your event business future-proof, you should take TED as a role model. You will never see a bad presenter stand on a TED stage. Why? Because TED really cares about the quality of their speakers. And so should you!
This article was originally written as a guest post for Presentation-Guru.com.
Image source: #101143687 | © vege – Fotolia.com
