sharpen your brand and impact your marketing efforts
more than putting on the hat of a meeting planner
and sitting on the other side of the desk. You instantly transform from the hunter to the hunted; from a
speaker looking for a gig to the decision maker being
pursued by speakers who want to be selected to speak.
That role takes on even greater significance—and increased pressure—when
the meetings you’re planning are for
your peers (in my case, fellow speakers)
as the “meetings chair” for NSA’s labs, workshop and
annual convention. It’s a volunteer position—a labor
of love that completely possesses you for months on
end and dominates your thoughts and imagination,
because you want to be a hero in the eyes of your
peers. You want to be the one who planned, promoted and produced the single greatest meeting they’ve
ever experienced. And knowing your reputation is at
stake, you take great caution to assure that everyone
who speaks at your meeting—from the keynotes on
the main stage to the smallest of breakout sessions—is
absolutely outstanding.
So, what does the chair of an NSA event get out of it?
In a word: perspective.
You see yourself through a completely different
lens. As you wade through mountains of demo tapes
and promotional packets, surf hundreds of speak-
er Web sites, and solicit candid opinions from promi-
nent speaker bureaus and agents, you see firsthand how
speakers are compartmentalized, evaluated, scrutinized
and dismissed—because you are the one do-
ing it. Suddenly, you find yourself in parallel
universe a la television’s American Idol judg-
es, transitioning from a warm and fuzzy Paula
to a discerning Randy to a no-B.S., nearly impossible-
to-impress Simon. And the experience will force you
to critically dissect and thoroughly reinvent everything
you do as a speaker, from your branding and marketing
to your speech content and delivery, to the way you an-
swer your phone and “sign” your emails.
Brace yourself. Allow me to forgo the flowery rhetoric, and cut to the chase a la Simon about what we
speakers (including me) need to do to break through
the elimination rounds and win the competition. And
By ERic cHEStER,
cSP, cPAE
