Tell the speakers that you liked their talks(ohhelloana.blog) |
Tell the speakers that you liked their talks(ohhelloana.blog) |
tl;dr: even if you don't tell a speaker you like their talk, definitely pay attention. Or leave. People work hard on this stuff!
Your folks, your taxi driver, the guys who get the garbage, your parrot.. Throw them a compliment now and then (even better palm them a fiver too)
I live in the UK where parting phatic expressions such as 'cheers', 'see you later', and 'take care' are common. But 'Have a good/great day' definitely is not.
and ngl yes of course I read it as something else first.
Anyway maybe they were glad that someone threw them even a phatic expression at all? :)
If you don't feel you can give a quick response in a way that will bring them to your side right away, instead of arguing simply keep a notepad handy and (visibly) take a quick note about what they said and thank them. Most folks that raise unreasonable criticisms at talks just want to be heard, and in my experience they may even suddenly become very friendly to you for visibly acknowledging their comments, opening the door for a productive and constructive conversation.
“Great questions/point - would be great to pick it up with you later. Any other questions?”
That's why "open with a joke" is so useful. It's not really for them! It's for you!. If you can hear a laugh from your audience, YOU start to chill out. Your body is like "ah. the mic is actually on, and I'm not having a stroke".
Another useful tip, if the scenario allows, try to hang out by the front row before your talk and chat someone up. That's who you want to then make eye contact with often during your talk. Their expression will be or at least seem to be warmer to you. And you'll feel some more calm looking at them than the random heads everywhere else.
Same with bands. "Loved your set" is one thing, "loved your set" because "it reminded me of…"/"made me feel…" is another.
The other week I said to a singer/songwriter that I had enjoyed her full band set the day before and that her guitarist had a really surprisingly dirty guitar sound, and she said "I know! and from such a clean-looking gentleman! I'll tell him that, he'll love it". We then chatted about how her music was (for philosophical reasons) not "guitar solo" territory but how inventive and supportive his playing was in that context and I said how well I thought she'd woven it all together.
The energy you bring to putting yourself in front of a crowd really in any context, whether professional or entertainment, formal/informal, planned/improvised, you take in part from the feedback from previous attempts; it's difficult to do it otherwise.
Seriously it makes their day. They’re people too!
So - I would pepper my talks with real-life scenarios and anecdotes - and alot of humour - because my audiences where in the "same trenches" as me.
Then, I gave a talk to an audience of ALL corporate developers (Windows world, so .NET) - it was such a weird vibe, I have never had such a stony-faced, unresponsive crowd of attendees. (But their written feedback/reviews were great, so...)
(It also didn't start well, because the venue hosts attempted to eject an attendee because of the way he was dressed (motorcycle leathers, jeans - honestly nothing offensive) - and "didn't look like he was supposed to be there" - I intervened - it turned out that he was a tech user-group leader in the local community, and was just "different/quirky".)
Every time it is days of anxiety trying to figure out how I am going to communicate the security ideas I want people to adopt in a way that may land this time, because I am convinced it could reduce a lot of harm if I am successful.
I never say no though because for whatever reason someone respected my work enough to invite me, and maybe this time I can convince even one org to make the changes to their security posture that are going to prevent the data or assets of the users that trusted them from being stolen.
After each event is days of kicking myself for all the things I should not have said, or should have said but failed to. All the ways I could have been more effective.
When zero people have any questions or feedback after, my brain tells me in a loop that nothing I said landed, and it is devastating. Did I get in a plane and go through so much effort only to confuse people and scare them further away from doing things that actually are pretty easy?
One time after a security panel at a big conference a single person came up to me after who told me what they agreed with, what they want to learn more about, and why. That person is my co-founder now.
Talk to speakers if you connected with what they said or reach out to them after. You may be the source of validation they need to keep trying.
You can approach any human, of any standing, anywhere on Earth, and if you ask a question that hits them right in their knowledge center, especially if it is something they don't commonly get to talk about, they will positively engage with you.
I know speaking with absolutes on the internet is a borderline crime, but this is so reliable I think it warrants it.
One notable exception to this is the person's work. Which I, personally, am not super inclined to talk about with people even though it comprises the vast majority of my knowledgebase. Maybe I'm projecting, but my guess is that Joe Schmoe isn't going to want to talk about his profession after coming home exhausted. That is, unless he's truly found his calling.
You ask enough questions about different topics and you'll get a positive reaction probably
My sense is that not many people do this and anyone who is not mega-famous rarely hears from strangers who like their work.
I'm hoping it makes people want to talk to me so I don't end up sitting alone during breaks! I have not managed to experience the mythical hallway track that everyone raves about...
(Another speaker said they're bringing stickers to bribe people - shit why didn't I think of that)
Occasionally I'll realize that the audience is some of the most well known names in my field and panic too much to do a good job. Having people ask to talk about my work afterwards always helps a lot with the subsequent spiraling thoughts. To be fair, I'd be happy even with criticism; that gives me something specific to improve rather than trying to figure it out on my own.
Been getting better at handling it as I gain more experience, but even then, being asked questions one-on-one really helps with knowing that the audience was genuinely paying attention.
Unfortunately I'm not the best at coming up with questions on the spot, I need time to digest the material. I admire people that can sit through a broad range of presentations and quickly have insightful questions for each one.
Best and brightest.
For example, refuse to present anything unless at least three members of the audience agree to share their feedback in the session.
Or alternatively, include in your presentation direct questions to specific members of the audience (either pre-arranged, or spontaneous).
And my friends are often surprised by me reaching out to strangers, so I seem to be unusually extroverted in this regard.
Which implies that there could be thousands of people out there whose lives I've affected (for better or worse!), and I'll never know. If only a fraction of a percent of them get back to me. Then that's just how it works.
While there are exceptions, there's usually very little you'd get from in-person talks. And quite often, the people who are giving these talks are serial presenters - as a lifestyle, or sometimes career building.
But then like I said, there are exceptions. Especially when it's about something interesting being demoed for the first time, or a deeply technical conversation. Those are not the norm.
I do agree that there are people for whom "the speaker circuit" is a job, and you can kinda smell it right from the presentation. But I think their numbers often depend on the type of event.
A few times, I approached speakers for saying I liked it but turned down, as they had to talk to people from bigger companies, and few even expressed unpleasantness to me.
Those are rare cases, so I still give props to speakers whenever I can.
My lesson was that there are shitty speakers for sure, but don't let it stop you from continuing to appreciate speakers.
Agree with the general concept
My favorite thing (mostly works with internal talks) is to hear people using the ideas I shared or doing some of the action items I talked about.
As for telling speakers you liked their talks, another higher up in the company used to send me a DM and thank/praise me. My guess is he did it for everyone, but still it felt very validating as a junior, both to be seen and also encouraged. It's a bit like with kids, tell them they're good at something (even if not), and they'll try to be, heh.
But I've tried to take that with me, and send DMs to people, where it maybe normally wouldn't feel natural for me. But after a while it does. And it can be even for small things, like "I like how well prepared you were for that meeting, any questions they had you could answer". You'll bet that person is well prepared the next time we have a meeting as well.
The audience is usually my internal team but I've never once seen their faces in the years I've worked at the company which definitely makes it more unnatural. It's the strangest feeling and I still haven't gotten used to it, but I think you just nailed why I feel like that!
How were they to know he belonged at the infrastructure engineering governance talk when the guy wasn't even wearing a fursuit?
As well - the fact that technical writing (in publishing at least) has been homogenized and steered-clear of the use of humour, metaphors, idioms and analogies has also moved me away from writing/technical editing - I miss the days of "quirky" books - things like Jeff Duntemman's "Delphi Programming Explorer", which IIRC was told as a hardboiled detective mystery. Or "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. Sure - I understand the driving commercial underlying reasons for this: profit + globalization - but I still miss those. Of course, with technical blogs available, there are still plenty of unique voices out there.
This way, anyone who wants to talk to you has a freebie question they can ask (and that you have interesting thoughts on), which may lead to further conversations.
As a bonus, pointing out 1-2 connections like this usually improves your talk for everyone, by adding context.
As someone noted, I always have my contact information (e.g., a LinkedIn profile) in my slide so people can reach out to me after the event and I actually had good conversations with people after conferences. Not only do I get feedback/questions on my presentation, but I get to expand my network.
I love taking my 45 minute talks and recycling them into a smaller time format. People feel like they're getting a lot of information when you have to gloss over portions of it or skip entire sections.
I've given one talk of mine in about 5 different venues, and the 30 minute version (which was EXTREMELY truncated) got some of the best feedback, despite me feeling like I didn't cover anything.
https://tagt.mccune.org.uk/ - has sections and links to specific parts of the video, so you don't have to watch the whole thing to get to a bit that seems interesting :)
I gave a talk with a section on curried functions and interspersed the content slides with pictures of Tim Curry, for example.
I generally advise people to put some jokes in if they like but don't make the talk rely on people getting the jokes.
Adding to this, don't automatically include <wait for laughter> in your joke delivery. Make the joke - if it lands and the audience is laughing, you can pause until it dies down. If the joke doesn't land, you just move on and everyone will forget about it.