S7E10: Customizing Keynotes

How can you tailor your keynote speeches to resonate with your audience on a deeper level? Today’s episode is about customizing keynotes to perfectly fit your audience. The episode highlights the adaptability required for different speaking styles and emphasizes the need to understand the audience's psychographics to deliver valuable content. Overall, keynotes should be personal and empathetic and have a keen understanding of audience dynamics. Be sure to follow along for more episodes in the coming weeks!

Today we are discussing:
Discussion Based Keynote (1:33)
Making Keynotes Personal (4:14)
Changing Speaking Styles (7:00)
Bringing Value to Your Keynotes (9:48)

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Transcript

Dr. K:
You are listening to the Experience University podcast with Dr K. Season 7, Episode 10.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to Experience University, where we aim to educate, inspire, and empower individuals who wish to design transformational experiences. Now, your host, Dr. Kristin Malek.

Dr. K:
Hello, hello, my friends! Everybody always tells me that every person is just a friend I haven't met yet. That is why I love to start this with, “Hello, hello, my friends.” I have had such really cool experiences over the last two weeks. I want to start off just covering some lessons that I learned from public speaking and keynote speaking for three different organizations all drastically different and some really interesting learning lessons from there.

So first, I have been very fortunate and super humbled when people reach out to me and ask me to speak for their groups. I am just always so humbled. I found that over the last two weeks, I've done three kind of keynote featured speaker sessions, and they were so drastically different. Two of them were zooms and one was in person, but one of the zooms was for CEOs, VPs and other C-suite and high-level executives in the event planning industry.

I think 25 people showed up on the call, and we were diving into event design, human-centered design engagement, recruiting for attendees, marketing, and sponsorships. It was a really, really great discussion, and I sat there, and I did Zoom (that's the modality that I was invited to present on.) With this particular group, I did not use any slides. We actually started the session with everybody going around, and this was a 60-minute session, and I spent the first solid 20 minutes going around to the people in the room. I said in 45 seconds, I want you to give me in 1 to 2 sentences the number one issue that you're facing in the event industry or within your job within the last six months or a year, and they all shared it.

They all had 1 to 2 sentences, and I was writing down like crazy. Why would I do this? Well, that's a great question. 1) It's a networking thing for them; 2) I don't want them to feel like they're alone in any of their issues, and 3) I could provide real, true, honest-to-goodness, speak to their heart and soul solutions, ideas to think about, hats to try on, very specific to their content that they're missing and that they're looking so desperately for.

And then I have a giant list of all their pain points and I can create custom trainings and workshops. I can come back in and speak on those. And I have all of this really rich data. But what I love about it is the fact that I then had these 25 points of data, and I could customize the whole rest of the hour specific to ideas, to examples, to the stories and the learning lessons.

No, of course, I'm not just going in blind clicking connect and talking. I have all of these things laid out in a nice organized way. So that way when I want to reference a particular example or case study or tell a story, I can easily pull up those documents. But this group was interesting, great people, and I get to meet some of them in person when I'm being brought into Dallas in December. So I'm very excited about that.

So that was on a Wednesday, and the following Monday, I was brought in person to a high school general session. I was the keynote for their professional development day in the auditorium. There were hundreds of people, and it was out of town for me. So I was wondering, “How did you even find me?” I love that, and they wanted me to come and speak about my success. You know, let people feel like they can do the same things that I've done. Doing my research on the school, I found this was a school that was in maybe a lower economic area. The kids had a higher dropout rate, very little engagement. There's a lot of diversity, which was really cool to experience. And you could just tell that they've been talked at for a long time, and they had years where they were on Zoom. And I came in, and I didn't have a PowerPoint because I knew I was talking to high schoolers, and you don't do that. So I came in and I just made a conscious decision at the beginning that I was going to cuss in the first two sentences just to show that, hey, maybe pay attention, sit up. This isn't normal for someone to stand up there.

So they did my professional bio. They talked about all my accolades, all the cool things that I've done. And here I am, I'm this 5 ft tall white girl, who's standing on the stage. A lot of people couldn't relate. They hear all this success, and they are seeing someone that may or may not look like them. And I got up on the stage, and my very first line was, “I want you to ignore everything you just heard.” “Like when I was growing up - this was my family situation. This is all the stuff that happened to me.” There's a lot more to get into than just on this podcast right now. And I really sat there and said, “Look, we can't judge books by covers, right? You hear my bio; it's a lot like social media. You see the highlights, you see the high points, but you don't see the low points. You don't see me sleeping in my car, you don't see me doing these things.”

The engagement from that group: nobody, almost nobody, was on their phone. I would ask questions throughout the presentation, and I would ask them for hand raises if it applied to them or didn't - almost full participation on that. Nobody fell asleep, which is the thing, if you've never spoken to high schoolers, especially in different types of economic zones. I was really impressed with the questions that were asked at the end, but it was a completely different speaking style. How I was talking to my C-suites and how I was talking to these high schoolers: completely different. And being able to adapt the vernacular to be able to use similar language, to be able to have that situational leadership and public speaking style was super interesting.

And then just this morning, I was invited; I did this two years ago. I was super humbled to be brought back, especially with the situation in the world right now. I was invited to speak to two universities in Ukraine on Zoom and one university from Washington State, Washington State University, the College of Business. It's a really cool global program that the professor there, Dipra Jha, runs. And I am always humbled when he invites me to come speak to these incredible future leaders.

I used a PowerPoint for this one because of the visual engagement, but also the fact that for a lot of the people on the call, English was not their first language, so I had some extra wordy slides so people could read, take pictures, or screenshot. However, with Washington State, students were in person, and the two Ukraine Universities were online. I really found the discussion fascinating. These kids are going through all of this stuff, these young adults, these college students, they're going through everywhere, right? Mental health crisis is a thing. But then also in Ukraine, they're literally in the middle of a war. There are so many students that obviously didn't have their cameras on, who knows what their situation is like, and they're showing up for themselves and showing up for their education.

And when I was in the question and answer portion, of course, you can ask questions throughout, but a lot of cultures do prefer to keep them to the end. I had one student write in the chat; "What do you think the war tourism is going to be like for the future of Ukraine?" And I had so many emotions about this. I had so many emotions in terms of, “Wow,” like you're already thinking about the future and building up your tourism economy and how you can use this to your advantage to help rebuild and to get money. And also, I am sitting there thinking, “I am not there. I can't accurately evaluate your infrastructure and all your different locations. I don't know what's still standing and what's not.” We get portions of the news, right? No matter where we are in the world. The discussion was so rich, and it was really incredible to see these different discussions.

So here I am, it's a two-week period, and I have had three public speaking keynote-type situations where they're all so different, so drastically different. And the person who had booked me for the keynote at the high school, I had reached out, and I just assured them, “If you invite me to speak to other groups, it's not going to be like that. It's going to be different every time.” And the feedback from all three of them were incredible. And the evaluation comments that I read went along the lines of, ‘it seemed like she was speaking directly to us about our issues and our problems.’ I'm teaching one class this semester in event design. I was talking to my class and I said, “You've got to know who you're talking to. You got to know who your participants are, and you don't need to know their demographics. You need to know their psychographics. You need to know what they want, what they need, what their pains are, what the gains are, what their struggles are. So you can really speak into it because people show up when they get value, and it's up to you to bring that value.”

And if you don't know, don't make something that's super, super generic. Don't make something that's just a slide deck with a bunch of data, facts, and bullet points. Really find out your audience. And if you don't know who your audience is, then ask them. Just ask them. That's exactly what I did in that webinar. I took almost half the time and said, “Tell me what your issues are because I would much rather give you a 30-minute, pinpoint, super detailed presentation that's exactly what you want and need in this moment than give you an hour of fluffy stories and generic concepts that may or may not help you.” I hope that you've enjoyed my oral reflection.

I'm trying to continue to document all the interesting things that I've been going through. I just wrapped up this sound healing session. It's just so fascinating. There's so much science in sound. And it's just another one of those interesting areas I get to pull into my behavior change design work. So, I'm going to dedicate the whole next episode to this particular area of the industry that I don't think we talk about enough. We normally talk about using the smell sense, you know, essential oils, etc., etc. and how that oral factory part of your body tends to be most associated with memories. But I don't think we talk enough about sound. If you have been to any events lately, and you've had a sound bath sign up, you know they're super popular. The rooms are always overflowing, and I didn't really get it. I thought it was kind of a fad. I thought it was like, ‘oh cool, we're doing a sound meditation.’ But knowing the science behind it and knowing how it feeds into the system overall and the implications that it has for behavior change. I'm super, super excited to share this with you. So until next week, have a wonderful day.

Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to the Experience University Podcast. Stay tuned for our next episode.