(Singapore, Singapore)
One of the best feedback you can get from a speech is not from the audience, but from your fellow speakers during a conference. If your speech is being referenced by the other speakers it is a statement that your speech was so important and relevant to the conference you are speaking at that the other speakers decided to reference back to your speech to make their point.
Today when I spoke at the Annual Convention of Asia Professional Speakers, Singapore (APSS) an association for professional speakers in Singapore, and got a great example of this happening.
I shared the stage with some of the best professional speakers in Asia (and some flown in from USA, Europe and Australia too.)
It was an awesome conference which I had the honor of opening with the first full length keynote of the day.
During the rest of the conference I would have 8 of the other speakers in one way or another refer back to my speech. (One even had a picture of me in his PowerPoint, another had, last minute, changed her presentation to add one new slide with a quote from my speech.)
So how did I do that? Well, there is no way you can “make” that happen, but you can increase the changes of it happening.
What I did do:
- By studying the conference program to understand what the other speakers would be speaking on, to make sure I was in-line with the theme of the conference.
- To contact (before the conference and in the networking before the conference) the other speakers and specifically ask them what their main take-aways would be during their speech (to be able to even better position my speech to fit well with theirs.)
When you close a conference you can gain huge extra bonus points with the audience by looking at your speaking slot as not just a slot to give a speech, but to also take the opportunity to summarise the whole conference.
If you are opening a conference you can gain similar bonus points with the audience by making sure that your speech sets the stage not only for your message, but for the whole conference that you have been given the privileged to open.
When your speech is being referenced during the whole conference your message is amplified by the other speakers – giving the audience a feeling that your speech “lingers” around the whole day.
That is powerful.
So make an effort to understand what the other speakers are going to speak about so that you can give a speech that gets referenced during the whole conference.
PS. The best part of speaking to an audience that consists of other professional speakers is that they are one of the nicest audiences that you can have. They really, really want to learn and they truly appreciate the art of speaking. And here they are kind enough to honor my speech with a standing ovation, something that is always nice to receive.
