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Submitting talks to a conference

In our last article, we talked about using strategy to get a promotion. Today, we are going to discuss how to get your proposal to speak at a conference accepted. 

There’s a conference coming up in a few months and you would like to submit a talk. However, you’ve submitted talks in the past and they haven’t been accepted. Why is this time going to be any different? The difference is that now you have the strategic tools that you can use to give yourself a huge advantage. That’s not a guarantee that your talk will be accepted, but it will give you a better chance. 


We’re going to use the same five concepts that we used in the previous article. Can you point out which parts of this belong to which concept?

When people think about speaking at conferences, their content is generally the first thing that comes to mind: - I will write an abstract that explains what I want to talk about and submit it. If it gets accepted or not will be a fact of natural selection. - This is not the best perspective if your goal is to get your talk accepted. As I will show, your content should be the last topic on your mind. 

Goals
The first thing that you have to understand is why you want to speak at the conference. There are generally 3 reasons:
  • further your career
  • get name recognition
  • share specific content

Why is understanding this so important? The most difficult
scenario is when you want to share specific content, because you are the least flexible. I proposed a talk at a major internal conference and was told that the topic was great, but they wanted me to focus on a completely different aspect than I had planned on. I had to make a decision regarding what was more important to me: speaking at the conference (and “selling out”) or being true to my content, but not being offered a place. I was able to compromise with them and added the content that I wanted to focus on as the last few slides under the title,”PoC that we are working on”.

Conferences generally have an agenda and a target audience. The more that you understand about this conference, the better chance you are going to have. For example, if it is a company conference focused on their customers, the acceptable talks are going to be
customer centric use cases of the company’s technologies. However, esoteric use cases or “cool technological advances” that you made are not relevant, no matter how excited you are about it. However, if it is a development conference, you want to make sure that you are showing code examples and diving into the nitty gritty. A use case example may help, but it's not why the people are there.

Timing
Timing is everything. Is the content that you want to present new and exciting, or old and worn out. Was there any publicity about the topic recently? For example, I was reviewing content for a conference a year ago and a suggested topic was “using machine learning to determine ‘fake news’”. Fake news was something that everyone was talking about, so it was a great topic. The exact same talk could have been given on “truth in advertising” and nobody would have cared.

Timing is not only relevant for the content, but also for the speaker. Sometimes you need to lay the groundwork well in advance to be considered qualified. Get your name out there so that when people think about the subject, they think about you. There’s a common expression, “it takes money to make money.” This is also true about name recognition. The more name recognition you have, the easier it will be for you to get more. Have you had any publicity recently? Do you write a blog or have you been interviewed? Try to release something shortly before the proposal review is supposed to take place. When the reviewers google you, are they going to find something that says “I want to hear this person”? You may need to spend a significant amount of time building up your name to get to the place where you want to be before proposals are reviewed.

Relevant Content
Now we’re ready to think about content, but not your content. The first thing you should do is review the talks that were accepted at this or similar conferences from the past couple years. Are there any themes you see running through, such as:
  • Practical examples
  • Live demos
  • New features or something new to the industry
  • A particular track or subtopic
  • Keywords or buzzwords
It's worth finding out who the conference organizers or talk reviewers are as well. It is perfectly acceptable to reach out to them or to other influential community members to ask what type of talk they are looking for or what they think of your idea. Don’t lobby them to accept your talk, but ask for advice regarding the subject. Read the suggested topics that the organizers posted and stay within their bounds. There’s a reason they took the time to tell you what they were interested in.

Your Content
The last stage in the process is your content. Don’t make your title too cute.  Talks titled “Alice in Wonderland” or “The butterfly spreads its wings” submitted to a tech conference likely won’t get accepted. (Actual talks that I’ve reviewed). Look for the latest trends that are relevant for this conference and see if you can fit that into what you would like to talk about. Your talk proposal shouldn’t only focus on raw content, but on the direction of the industry and how you’re content is relevant to that. Reach out to your network to get feedback on your topic. The specific question you want to ask is - “given this title and this abstract, how interested would you be in attending the talk”. Make sure you add a sentence or a few bullets at the end to detail, “What are the attendees going to get out of this.” 

Submission
Before you submit the abstract make sure you review it for spelling and grammar mistakes. Ask people who are not in the industry to read the talk and see if they can understand what you are planning on speaking about. 

If you don’t have experience or if you don’t have any published videos, it might be worth putting up a demo talk or two on YouTube. You can submit this as an example of your presentation capabilities.


Maybe the most important thing is, once your talk gets accepted - practice and practice and practice. If you do a good job, you are more likely to get invited back.


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