Things to Do If Your Conference Gets Cancelled- Booklet Edition

It doesn’t matter if you’re a speaker, meeting planner, vendor, or anything else associated with a conference, things happen and the events can get cancelled. But they will come back! Use the coronavirus as an example and a training ground. At some point conferences will come back. Once the scare is over or a cure …

Conference Best Practices no. 21- Do you have a policy in place for cancelling your conference for the Coronavirus?

Less than 3 months after the initial outbreak of the Coronavirus, conferences and events were already being cancelled. Even so, many major events are still moving forward. This made me wonder how many of you have a policy in place for cancelling your conference if it has to happen. It can be for any reason …

Conference Best Practices no. 42- How many times do you use the same speaker and trainers?

This is a question that I’ve come across many times over my own speaking career…how many times do you use the same speaker and trainers? For the sake of this conversation, let’s ignore keynote speakers. Few conferences will use the same one year after year. That’d get boring. At best, keynoters will only return to …

How do you feel about gender specific conferences? (Best Practices no. 12)

I recently attended and assisted with a conference that was for men only. At least that’s what the website said when I came across it. As a matter of fact, one of the words in the name of the conference was “Brotherhood”. As attendees started arriving, it looked just like I expected. Since it was …

Conference Best Practices- Advice from a Celebrity Rep for Speakers and Promoters

It’s time for more advice from Rikki Adams, a man who works with celebrities at conventions fulltime. I’ll just leave it all in his words. Advice for speakers- Don’t be afraid to go off script and engage the audience. A lot of moderators have no clue who you are and will ask questions based on …

Best Practices no. 124- Advice from a Guy Who Works with Conference Celebs

Last time I talked about using celebs to boost attendance at conferences, so this week I thought I’d talk with a guy who works WITH the celebs. Just don’t call him an Agent (you’ll see why later). Here’s Rikki at a convention with actor Brian O’Halloran from Clerks. I met Rikki Adams a few years …

How to Convince Employers to Send People to Your Conferences

I wish I had come up with this myself, but I cannot claim credit for it. The team over at the Social Media Marketing World came up with a great resource to send to potential attendees. It is just a sample letter and instructions that folks can pass on to their employers asking permission to …

Welcome to Best Practices for Conferences and Vendors

Welcome to a new series for conference planning, conference vendors, and all things related! I bet some of you get all weird with conferences, with post it notes and mindmaps all over your living room wall. That’s okay, though, because I do that working on my keynotes. In the biz we just call it storyboarding …

Don’t Be the Guy that Does this at a Conference…

The following is an excerpt from my e-mail newsletter on Best Practices for Conferences, Vendors, and Speaker. Subscribe to the newsletter HERE. Since we talked about great vendor booths in the last e-mail, I think it is time to talk about the dark side of them. Among all the free goodies, celebrity guests, and multimedia …

Brand Spanking New Newsletter- Best Practices for Conferences, Vendors, and Speakers

I know this won’t apply to all of you, but I wanted to let you know about a new e-mail newsletter that I’m starting up. I’ve been speaking at conferences and training events all over the world for several years and attending them for even longer.   Because of this, I’ve had quite a few …