How to Capitalise On Your Tech Talk

So, you’ve decided to do a tech talk. Or any public speaking, really. That’s great! You may be a seasoned pro, or this might be your first time, in which case, pal, you’re in for a wild ride!

Good talks take an incredible amount of work to prepare, rehearse and deliver. So why would anybody actually do one?

Motivations

The best talks are borne out of your desire to share something you’ve learned, and to teach others. If your goal is to simply promote yourself or your company, chances are your talk is going to be average at best, or worse, a transparent waste of everyone’s time.

But we’d all be lying if we said we only did talks to share and to teach. It’s completely ok to admit that you also want to be rewarded for your labour. Some conferences pay for you to speak (and more should!), others don’t (but you’ll usually get a free trip out of it!), and most local meetups can’t afford to (and that’s ok).

So how can you capitalise on your hard work?

Attention capital

Call it whatever you want: name recognition, personal brand, credibility. Giving valuable tech talks will give you these things, and those in turn will present you with new opportunities: to boost your career, to make new connections, to enjoy new life experiences.

I’m not ashamed to say I currently have the best job I’ve ever had almost solely because of public speaking and my open source projects. Similarly, I just spent a month travelling the U.S., and everywhere I went, I was glad to meet friends and make new ones, all via the connections and recognition I’ve gained doing public speaking.

So, yeah, it’s been worth the thousands of hours of work!

Five Tips for Maximising Your Impact

Along the way, I’ve learned a few tricks that will maximise the value I get from the work I put into each talk. Here they are!

1. Credentialise yourself

In the beginning of your talk, tell the audience why they should listen to you on this topic. What have you done in this space? Why is your point of view valuable?

This will make the audience engage more with your ideas, but it will also make them associate the ideas with you.

2. Drive attention to your channel of choice

The audience will hopefully learn something from your talk, but they’ll forget the talk itself, and the person who gave it. You want to “convert” (sorry, I hate marketing speech too) the room to your followers, fans or advocates.

Whether your preferred channel is your blog, your Twitter, you YouTube, or your LinkedIn (lol), pick one channel and drive people to follow you there. I personally drop my Twitter handle at the beginning of the talk, and repeat at the end of it with a clear, explicit call to action: “Follow me on Twitter.”

3. Make your content shareable

What really matters is amplification. You want the people in the room to be sharing your content to their followers on your preferred social channel.

• Have pretty slides with punchy, short, relatable sentences in a large font. Keep them on the screen long enough for people to take photos.
• Say quotable things, and say them slowly and with intention. Years later, people still keep quoting “Redux is not great for making simple things quickly. It’s great for making really hard things simple”, a one-off punchline I dropped at my first ever conference talk.
• No matter how small the venue, prepare and rehearse your talk to the hilt. If the event publishes videos of their talks, doubly so! It absolutely kills me that the most popular talk (300k views and counting) I’ve ever given was also the worst prepared, completely unrehearsed, and the slides look like absolute trash — you never know who’s going to see it!

4. Focus on the follow-thru

This is the most important step! How do you drive people to your preferred channel? How do you ensure people share it? Give them something they want, and can share to their followers, that’s only available through your channel.

Sharing your slides is OK, but to be honest I’ve never looked at anyone’s slides. Once you’ve done the hard work of preparing a talk, it’s usually not a long stretch to turn it into a blog post, an open source library, or whatever medium is relevant to you.

I like to finish my talks with something like “we’re out of time, but we’ve only scratched the surface of the topic. If you want to learn more, please follow me on Twitter, where I will post a link to an in-depth blog post, and in the upcoming days continue to share more on the topic.”

Now, that’s my line, you can come up with something that fits you, but the key is to focus on a concrete takeaway. Have this content prepared, post it immediately after you get off stage, and @ the conference using their hashtags. People browse the conference hashtags on breaks to find out what other people are saying!

5. Repeat

Never did an artist become popular by playing one amazing gig and then calling it quits. Once you’ve built an audience, you have to reinforce that relationship by engaging on the channel your fans are on, and keep delivering new material.

Your mileage may vary, but my public speaking career looked something like this:

• 2016: Smaller local meetups
• 2017: Larger local meetups and accepted to few conferences
• 2018: Invited to speak at conferences
• 2019: MC’ing conferences and choosing among few exciting speaking opportunities.
• 2020: No idea yet! I’d love to speak at XOXO, SXSW or a TEDx, but remains to be seen! 😉

So, to sum it up, a great talk is about the content and your passion to share, but you deserve the credit for your hard work. The rules I have discovered along my journey to capitalise on my talks are:

1. Credentialise yourself.
2. Drive attention to a channel of your choice.
3. Make your content shareable.
4. Focus on the follow-thru.
5. Repeat.

If you want to see me put my tips to action, I’ll be MCing React Amsterdam and React Finland, and speaking at React India!

To live by my own advice, please do follow me on twitter dot com where I write about topics ranging from public speaking to software development — and a lot of shitposting!

P.S. If you want to work for a company that understands and values public speaking and our employees’ personal branding as part of their career development, check out our open roles at Formidable!