Keynotes For Keynote Speakers

Carlos Bucheli
Sep 6, 2018 · 8 min read

During my professional life I’ve been engaged into several endeavors for both teaching and keynote speaking, which inevitably has lead me to research, learn and improve myself in those areas. In this article I’m compiling some key notes that will help you create a succinct professional biography and an effective presentation for your keynotes and events, so… let’s get this party started!

Remember… all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more…

Let’s start with the end, we’ll consider Bruce Wayne as a Keynote Speaker and create a biography and a description for his next event. Check out the final result here.

Checkboxes

Those little square boxes will be your companions during this journey, for every list you gather or generate, use a checkbox on every item. It doesn’t have to be a real one, you can use brackets and “x” as checkboxes.

A basic layout for lists and checkboxes (a.k.a. The obsessive way)

Main Topic / Area of Interest

Write the main topic or area of interest for your keynote, this will help you to keep a clear and achievable goal. Bellow it, write a very quick line about what you’re going to talk. By the end of this article you’ll be able to easily create an engaging title or name for your event.

Your Ideas

Convert your main topic into your own group of ideas (only yours), even if they seem futuristic or unearthly; a list of 10 items would be good enough, in case you have more include them anyway, I’ll tell you what to do with them later on.

Ideas from Others

Search for companies and individuals working with and/or talking about the main topic or area of interest (i.e. articles, public keynotes, white papers, state-of-the-art reports). While doing your search you’ll certainly read a few pages about what those companies do and find out which are the most trending organizations and topics; copy some public paragraphs that you find important from those trending companies and individuals.

This step is where you’ll get and work the most, articles and web pages can contain several sections and subsections that may serve you as muse while paragraphs will give you more details about them, generating in your brain new and innovative ideas either for you keynotes, your organization as a whole or to initiate a benchmarking process.

From all that public content you’ll highlight or separate in another list or document several keywords from which you’ll eventually select those most important and use them as part of you SEO strategy.

Building an Index

From those list of ideas and topics, grab those that are obviously bigger than others, they will serve as chapters or episodes for future articles or keynotes related to the main topic or area of interest but most importantly as a rough index either for organizing your ideas or the actual content of your keynote. Additionally, you can make a mixture of terms and create a custom item, mark the checkboxes for those used topics.

This is the core of your preparation process, this index will help you match your crazy ideas, real-life experience and trending topics in a nice bundle (nope, we’re not using Webpack for this kind of bundle). You can order it in any way you want, for my keynotes I like to organize it in the same order as my slides are.

In this image you can see an example of a rough index without particular order, you’ll see how it’s changing along the way.

Professional Experience

If you’re a keynote speaker, you certainly have some proven experience in the main subject or area of interest, thus, consider your CV as a tool. Pull it out from whatever rock it’s under and start reading it, you might end up updating it if you need to, even though that’s not an objective for this article. When reading your experience do it aloud, that will help you identify flaws in both your speech and writing.

Write down a description for every single company or project you have worked with, you can avoid being formal on your writing for the description, use your own words; what’s important here is that YOU understand what you’re writing. Include your responsibilities, achievements and even negative points and failures, we’ll deal with the negative points in time.

Syntactic Sugar

Yes, I know that’s a techy term, the bottom line on that term is sophistication. So far I’ve been telling you to create lists and “this helps to do that”, as well as advising to use your own words to describe you experience. Now it’s time to get serious, with grammar, orthography and language. The list of important paragraphs is your muse, you already digested all those words so your brain is ready; formal and engaging writing is the glue for putting items from those lists together.

Synthesize and formalize your experience in several sentences or a few paragraphs (2 or 3) within your main index. This is the very essence of your professional biography, speak of yourself in third person. Yes, you read that right, SPEAK, write it down then read it out loud then change what seems inaccurate or repetitive.

To fully complete your speaker bio, write a small paragraph that sums up who you are and give a sign of success, use it as the first paragraph of your bio. After all what you’ve done so far during this article I’m sure you can tell something catchy, effective and quick about yourself, do as many attempts as you need.

That catchy line will engage people to read more about you or your event, thus, let’s give them a little bit more detail, shall we? Create more paragraphs, one for describing an outstanding achievement and 1 or 2 to “sum-up” yourself. Now you’ve come full circle with your professional biography.

In the same way, synthesize topics from your presentation. If you have your topics ready you’ll just need to copy and paste them, if not, use your list of ideas and ideas from others and organize them in a logical way. Again, generate as many options as you feel comfortable with. Here you can see how a presentation index gets transformed into actual content using “syntactic sugar”.

Now let’s take a look the synthesized description for Bruce’s next event:

As we all know, public speaking events are usually accompanied by beverages, food and other speakers or important guests (maybe even those important companies or individuals you found), thus, let’s write something engaging about that:

Finally, all these formal talking and writing gives you the chance to create a proper title for your keynote or update the current one, so let’s go back to the top of our lists and read that little line we wrote along with the main topic. If your title fits your content then you’re ready, if not, change it. Additionally, I strongly recommend one of my favorite tools: Portent’s Content Idea Generator (you’ll love it!).

Tap Into the Social-Force

As a keynote speaker, you must consider yourself as a public figure since the very beginning. Remember those trending companies and individuals? Invite them to your event, even if they are not located in you city, video-record your presentation and make it public, write an article out of your presentation, share the article and your slides in social networks, tag those companies and individuals and politely invite them to watch, read and drop some comments. Use the list of keywords you generated all along the process and use them in your website and article.

Also, you can video-record yourself presenting your bio, the last event you participated in and the next keynotes you’ll be presenting. Use those videos for applying to conferences around the world (check the list of upcoming O’Reilly conferences, you’ll find a couple of sample proposals in there).

Back to the Future

All those crazy ideas that you didn’t include in your preparation are just some breadcrumbs for your future research, projects and keynotes. In a similar manner, those failures and mistakes you’ve listed will guide you into what needs to be changed in the near future.

Once you get the whole thing done, those ideas will serve you as a checklist to keep an eye on market trends and/or filter them in a professional way in order to decide if you’ll engage in endeavors or projects based on those ideas, for that purpose I suggest to use the “Opportunity Screening Funnel” created by Michael E. Gordon.

Note: The mentioned funnel has been truly helpful to me so, when you read that book, please consider that I avoid politics in my professional life. There’s no relation between politics and me!

If you prefer to go deeper, you can create an organized spreadsheet in order to compare yourself with those trending subjects, companies and individuals, getting to know how “trendy” you actually are (in other words, use them as KPIs).

What about those failures and mistakes…?

We learn the most from our failures and mistakes, when we acknowledge what we did wrong or what could have been done better or different we can effectively identify what we could or must change and what to avoid in the future. My advice here is to use a template, thanks to the PMBOK I’ve adopted the “lessons learned template” as a “professional habit”. Well, as a personal habit too…

I suggest to do the same after your event (e.g. the next morning) and share it with your team members and other project teams so you and them gain new knowledge and can avoid pitfalls in the future. You can find a simple template and a real-life example here and there.

Review & Proofreading

As a last step, grab a coworker and a person outside your company, give them a copy of what you just wrote and ask them to proofreading it. Analyse their suggestions and answer their questions, change whatever you need to change.

Carlos Bucheli

Written by

Senior Engineer specialized in software development, 17+ years’ experience using leading-edge technologies, born in Quito now living permanently in Buenos Aires

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