Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at Blog Indiana. If you’re not familiar with it, Blog Indiana is a popular blogging and social media conference in Indianapolis and is very well attended and includes some great content.
So I gave a presentation called “Internet Marketing in 90 Minutes a Week” during the afternoon slot. Now normally, I am pretty confident in my speaking. I usually get great feedback, I spend hours and hours tweaking my content to be very high value, and I genuinely love connecting with the audience.
However, at Blog Indiana I did not have an outstanding experience. It started off with some technical glitches that involved me having to use a handheld microphone instead of a lapel mic (I hate handheld mics!) so that sort of bummed me out. However, the real problem was how I was targeting my presentation. Because my title was catchy, I filled the room and they had to open up the side wall in order to accomodate everyone who attended. This was awesome and as a speaker I love to see this. However, as I was giving my presentation, I started to realize that I had made a mistake.
My presentation was not about Internet marketing, it was about content marketing – which is much more specific. In my effort to create a catchy, demand-creating title, I had boxed myself into a corner of having to deliver something sensational to a crowd that included some pretty savvy marketers. To be fair, their were some beginners in the crowd, as well, who learned a lot but a lot of the attendees were already doing a many of things I was covering and were probably not all that impressed.
As I continued the presentation, I got more and more upset with myself for getting the title out of sync with the content and I felt terrible for incorrectly setting expectations. My presentation was a great overview of how to be productive with a content marketing plan but I could tell that a lot of the attendees were there to be wowed by my supposed ability to boil all of Internet marketing down to 90 minutes.
The presentation went ok and didn’t bomb or anything and I even got some decent feedback afterward, but since I’m a perfectionist I was pretty bummed. I beat myself up over it and got really upset.
I was even more upset because I was giving the same presentation the next day as a webinar. How could I repeat the same mistake? Then I realized that I didn’t have to. Two hours before the webinar, I changed the title, tweaked a few slides to get even more specific, and then presented “Content Marketing in 90 Minutes a Week.” Guess what? It went great. I could tell that my message was flowing logically, my content was accurate and relevant, and I got a ton of great questions and lots of positive feedback afterward.
What did I learn? Well, one thing I learned was that I need to be careful when creating presentation titles. I tend to come up with titles first and then create the presentation afterward which can sometimes backfire. More importantly, however, I learned that it’s ok to fail and then course correct. Not every presentation is going to be a 100% knockout. Sometimes I will make a mistake and deliver 73%. As long as I understand what went wrong and can course correct, it makes me a better speaker.
Was it a little awkward to change my title two hours before the presentation? Sure, a little. But all I had to do was explain very honestly why I did it at the beginning of the presentation and then it was on to delivery. It wasn’t awkward because I believed in my message again.
Has anyone else had experiences like this as a speaker? I would love to hear your stories in the comments below.
Happy Thanksgiving!
