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Thought Leadership for Earned Speakers | Lori Zetlin (Rosmarin) & Eric Zetlin
Using thought leadership to earn speaking engagements.
An interview with Lori Zetlin (Rosmarin) and Eric Zetlin about how they help executives become earned speakers, working with conference organizers, and the changes COVID-19 has presented in the speakers’ industry.
Today’s guests are from S3 – Strategic Speaker Services: Lori Zetlin (Rosmarin), the Founder, and Managing Principal, and Eric Zetlin, the Managing Director. S3 builds world-class executive visibility programs for global brands and dynamic startups—delivering the right speaking opportunities and the most desirable audiences to their clients.
Earned Speaking
Eric and Lori explain the concept of Earned Speaking. They discuss how executives can go about gaining speaking engagements at conferences without having to pay to be a sponsor. Then, they shed some light on what those earned speaking opportunities look like. Afterwards, they talk about the matchmaking process they through to line their clients up with the right conference.
For the last year, speakers have had their careers turned upside down by COVID-19. Lori and Eric share their experiences taking things virtually. In addition, they reveal why many conferences are getting larger turnouts virtually than they ever did in person. They discuss the benefits of not having to travel beyond just the time savings.
If you are a speaker looking to increase your visibility and stay thriving in this virtual setting, this episode is tailor-made for you!
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview
- Becoming an earned speaker as a thought leader means landing an engagement based on the content of your message and not the size of your wallet.
- It can be best to pass on speaking at some conferences. You want to ensure your thought leadership is delivered to the right audience and not simply the widest one.
- Virtual conferences are allowing thought leaders to attend conventions nationally and globally. For many, these conferences would have been difficult to attend in the past due to time and travel.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to a virtual market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. We can help you implement book launches, marketing, research, sales so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about thought leadership within organizations. I want to explore the concept of executive visibility as a way that organizations can deploy thought leadership to the right audiences. And so that means the world of conferences and conventions. While that had an established track before the world of Covid 19 is transformed substantially since Covid 19. With me to talk about this topic today are two people who know this world very well. Lori Zetlin Rosmarin is the founder and managing principal of Strategic Speaker Services. Eric Zetlin is the managing director. Their organization specializes in executive visibility campaigns. I’m eager to talk with them about Ernst speaking the transformation they’ve seen in the conference world during the past year of Covid 19 and how to identify and nurture speaking talent deeper within your organization. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Eric and Laurie.
Lori Zetlin Thank you, Bill. Glad to be here.
Eric Zetlin Thanks, Bill.
Bill Sherman So I want to start with a topic that you and I have talked about before, which I think is really important for folks who are practicing thought leadership at the organizational level. The concept of earned speaking. Eric maybe you could introduce that concept and explain it because I really think it’s powerful.
Eric Zetlin Yeah, it’s it definitely is powerful. Bill. The idea is this if you are an executive at a at an organization and you decide that you want to speak at a major conference, perhaps it’s from a media publisher or somebody in your industry, you’ve got a couple of different ways of going about that. One is you can sponsor that conference and essentially pay for a speaking opportunity or you can earn the right to speak based on the content of your message. And what we find is that by recommending a speaker and enabling them to win a speaking opportunity, those speaking opportunities tend to carry more credibility for your audience.
Bill Sherman Great. Laurie, can you give me an example of what the earned speaking opportunity looks like, maybe a story that helps prevent life into it?
Lori Zetlin Absolutely. This is all we do 100% of the time. Bill. So happy to give you a couple examples and expound if we want to. There was a CEO of a company that we’re still work with. We’ve been working with them for about seven years and he is an incredible, incredible CEO, an incredible thought leader, an incredible speaker. And he wants to get in front of an audience that usually all of their keynotes are sponsored keynotes. And we ended up creating a pitch and got him to speak. The conference was Mobile World Congress, and we got him to speak based on his expertise, based on the fact that he was going to educate the audience and have them hear things that they’ve never heard elsewhere. And so we work not only with the executives that we represent, Bill, but we’ve worked long and hard building relationships with conference organizers, the people who put the agendas of conferences together. So we just worked hard and long with the conference organizer and really pitched the CEO. And it was the first time that we believe somebody was able to get a keynote opportunity at a huge large conference in the technology industry without necessarily paying for it. And the benefits that he had, that his company had and that the audience received were huge.
Bill Sherman Well, and let’s drill down on that. We use the term earned speaking, and I think that makes a nice connection to earned media, right. From the world of PR, where people are tuning in, paying attention and picking up your story because they believe they have an audience that wants to hear it right. So from the conference planners perspective, it’s not that you’ve written a check and you’re a platinum level sponsor. Therefore you get 35 minutes after the dinner here. It’s something very distinctive. Like you said, that CEO was recognized of having something to say that other people wouldn’t be bring to the conversation. And so there’s a couple of steps there. You have to know what your secret sauce is, Right? You have to know what you’re bringing to that conversation. And then you have to have the reputation. To be known as, that’s the person we need to get. So talk about the process of matchmaking, if you will. How do you get the person with the message to the right audience?
Lori Zetlin I’m happy to take that on first. Again, it’s a lot of it’s really all about relationships. So we work long and hard with these conference organizers. I think everybody that’s listening probably is aware that a lot of major media publications hold conferences. It’s taken us a long time and hard work to have them know that they can trust us if we’re going to pitch a speaker to them. They know that if we’re going to pitch somebody to a high caliber conference or a subject matter expert to an industry protocol conference, that, hey, we know what we’re talking about, that we’re not going to provide them. Someone who we don’t really understand and whom we might say is a great speaker, but we never heard them speak before. And then boom, we lose our reputation and our clients lose their reputation as a great speaker. And the conference organizer won’t necessarily want to work with us again. So that’s really, really important in terms of building a relationships.
Bill Sherman So when you go into an organization, I’ve seen this and I’m curious to see if you do as well that there’s a usual suspects for speaking, that often the people who are speaking speak to the same group over and over again, and those may be the converted rather than the ones that are trying that the audience needs to be. Right. And so you’re doing the easy outreach rather than reaching the audience. That’s critical, right? And so someone comes and says, Hey, can you speak to this group? Yeah, I’ll say yes, But there’s not selective no’s happening that you’re saying yes, because it’s an opportunity and it’s easy rather than yes because it’s the right audience. Do you see that? Yeah. Eric.
Eric Zetlin Thanks, Bill. We see that all the time. And that happened in a couple of different ways. When we build a speaking program for a client, we have the concept of proactive speaking opportunities, which is once we get to know the different speakers that we’re working with and representing. We try to identify the perfect audiences to go after proactively to win for them that the folks that their message will resonate most with. Once the speaker starts speaking quite a bit, what will happen is they’ll be seen and they’ll be invited to speak more and more. And oftentimes speaking, invitations will come across their desk. We call those reactive opportunities, and many of them just won’t be appropriate. And another thing that we do for those speakers is we will evaluate those because they tend to not there will be several titles that they will be familiar with. And we will make we will filter that out and identify the ones that are truly work speaking.
Bill Sherman Can you drill down on that and give an example of what that looks like, where of how that filter happens?
Eric Zetlin Yes. One of the things that we’re always trying to evaluate in the building of a speaking program is what is goodness read for speaking at a given conference. And it’s a combination of things we actually have created a tool for doing that is a combination of the other speakers that will be there. Are they the right level, like our speaker? Are they too high or too low? The reputation of the conference organizer themselves, the size and level of audience and subject matter expertise. If the only time these newbies are these are these consumers or are these practitioners in the in the environment that the speaker is an expert in, how much media will be there that might pick up stories in print that come from the speech that the speaker gives? A few more things, but we sort of put those together into a matrix and essentially give it a score and said, yes, this one, this one crosses the threshold. This one does it. It might be better for somebody in your organization if you’re a senior executive or it might be best to say no altogether to that opportunity.
Bill Sherman Well, and there’s a couple of options. You could, as a senior executive say no, or you could say, that’s good, but it’s not my time. Let me opt over to someone else, someone who may be a little bit more junior, but still it gives them a development opportunity as well to speak in front of an audience and start getting better at conveying message. So go ahead.
Lori Zetlin I was just going to say, that’s a great point there. Oftentimes. So the way that our business works is they’re the companies. Large enterprises usually retain us and they’ll say, okay, we want to get our CEO and they’re his or her direct report speaking. And then we have all these different business units. We want to get some of these experts speaking on particular topics. What we need to always ask is corporate communications or the people that might retain us might just assume, hey, my CTO, my CIO, they need to get out there. But our first question is, does your CIO and does your CTO know that they’ve been nominated to speak and are they good at getting the message out there to audiences? And oftentimes we have to create a specific plan of attack for each speaker. So we might be working with 20 folks at one company. We might somebody might be an up and comer or somebody may be a very senior executive, but they might not be a great presenter. So in that case, we’re going to say, okay, we believe this person should get out there, but let’s start with a panel of her peers. Let’s her let’s get her to speak on a panel where she doesn’t have to prepare. She doesn’t have to worry about standing behind a podium or just being on stage by herself, lets her get her comfortable with the concept. And one of and that is so powerful, Bill, because if somebody speaks once they get comfortable, if they speak ten more times, they get more and more comfortable. And so what we’ve seen is over the years, we’ve built these superstar speakers because we start off knowing where they should be, what they should be talking about, who they should be reaching. And it’s a formula that works really, really well.
Bill Sherman You set people up for success. You don’t throw them in the deep end of the pool and say, Hey, you’re going to be in front of 10,000 people for your first speaking event. Good luck. Do well. Plan a PowerPoint, right? That just doesn’t work, right? But like you said, you start with panels and you have to think of it as talent development in many ways, because these people may be used to doing presentations within the organization or a presentation to a client. But there is a difference when you’re on stage and a different mindset and a different engagement with the audience, different storytelling that happens. And that leads to a question for me. We’re now, as we record this, we’re in February of 2021, which means we’re a year into Covid and the transformation of the speaking world. And I’d love to get both of your perspectives. Maybe you start first, Eric, on what has changed. You know, and I know that the first few months of Covid in 2020 are very different from where we are now. But let’s get a sense of where the landscape is today and the aha’s that we’ve learned about the world just speaking over the last year.
Eric Zetlin Thanks, Bill. Because we focus really exclusively on executive visibility programs, which means placing executives at competence to speak. We were facing an existential threat for our own business because we thought companies were fully going away. In fact, physical conferences did fully go away last year.
Bill Sherman They evaporated within a matter of weeks into thin air.
Eric Zeltin They sure did. They sure did. And what we didn’t expect we did expect that virtual conferences would come in and take their place. We didn’t. We underestimated how powerful those would turn out to be. As a result, almost everybody who was creating a physical conference was forced to figure out what their response to the pandemic would be and create somehow a virtual conference. Now, as you can imagine, there are all sorts of different types of conference producers out there and all sorts of levels of success. Some did it really well. Some did it quite poorly, and others started out kind of rough and really learned as the year went on. So it was really difficult for us to assess how good a given virtual conference might be when they were very new back last May and June. Now that we’ve got a few months under our belt, we’re able to see all these guys really produce a great conference. These guys are still kind of working on it, so let’s hold off.
Bill Sherman So if you were to distill learnings on that and maybe, Laurie, what are the things that are working in the virtual conference world and what are the things that have changed that are really being impactful for organizations working on earned speaking?
Lori Zetlin Absolutely. I think that one of the biggest things is as what we’ve seen and what the folks that produce conferences have seen is that they are getting more attendees at their virtual conferences than they’ve ever had at their live events. And that makes.
Bill Sherman It because you don’t have to travel.
Lori Zetlin Right, Exactly. Exactly. And some of them, you know, all of 2020, there were hardly any registration fees to attend a conference. That’s shifted a bit from, I would say, Q4 to now. And moving forward in the virtual world, people will pay a registration fee to hear thought leaders speak about topics folks want to hear about. The other thing that’s changed dramatically and the three of us can attest to this personally is that people are on video calls and videos so much more than they’ve ever been. So for and we and we assessed and attended as many conferences as we could at the end of Q1 and Q2 and Q3 of last year. And we created a study and presented to some of our clients. But the bottom line is you cannot have an eight hour day online. You just can’t. If your audience is not going to stick around there. You’re missing the lack of networking that you get at a live event. So really, it’s sort of you need to be really impactful really quickly. You need to capture the attention of your audience and you just need to be interesting.
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Bill Sherman So let me ask you this question. And we talked a little bit about the change from the participants side of the need to travel the speakers side. So you talk about executive speaking often to get an executive to go speak at a conference, you had to take them offline for at least a day and a half, possibly up to three days for travel on either end to deliver maybe a one hour speaking event. Now, in the virtual world and you’re working with executives, what are you seeing in terms of weaving, speaking into an executive’s sort of calendar? Is it easier or harder? What are the patterns you’re seeing?
Lori Zetlin It’s actually easier right now because just like you said, Bill, the time commitment is so much less so the prep is the same. If somebody is going to be giving a keynote, that prep is exactly the same. But if someone’s going to be doing a fireside chat, really it’s it’s sort of a planning call with the person who’s going to be interviewing them and the conference folks and then probably their communications team. So they really have their messages down pat. But what we’re finding is most folks and the busier they are, the happier they are that they do not have to travel, that a day and a half turns into really a two hour live commitment plus a few hours of prep time. And that’s. A huge benefit to them.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think for business travelers, speakers, etc., that wear and tear, that comes from travel. A lot of us are grateful that we’re not feeling that right. Yeah, we may be missing certain parts of the travel. We may miss, you know, the preflight safety announcement. But definitely. Right. It’s it’s one of those things where we can get more done. And you don’t realize until you slow down your travel how much you really lost on that. So does that mean you’re able to place your executives more, Lorie, or what do you think?
Lori Zetlin We think well, we get the way that we assess and determine where folks should be placed and where they should speak hasn’t really changed. So it’s not a more versus less. I think it’s it’s an assessment of what has morphed virtually that is still as good or better than a live conference. And it’s funny, Bill, because I think of one example of a client we have, and one of the reasons that he and his company are speaking is really to develop qualified leads for their own business. So in that sense, the virtual speaking world is not ideal for that individual and their company. But on the other hand, if we’re dealing with, I would say in general a larger company and the virtual aspect is beneficial to them.
Bill Sherman So I think it also creates the opportunity. As you said, more conferences went virtual. Now, some of them are going to a pay format or at least some sort of fee for the democratization of thought leadership within the organization, because there are so many events that are out there that you can expand your reach to events and organizations that you normally wouldn’t have traveled to or wouldn’t have been able to travel to, whether from a budgetary perspective, a time perspective or just a distance perspective. And so I think one of the things we’ve done is conferences in many ways have gone much more national and global than we would have described them in the beginning of 2020. Is that a fair assessment? Does that match with what you’re seeing?
Eric Zetlin Yeah, definitely. Because conferences had been physical beings, physical events, Web summit, for instance, in Lisbon or Mobile World Congress in Barcelona attracted certain audience profiles that started, from a local perspective, very European audiences. That is becoming less and less so. And Billy exactly right. Audiences are becoming more and more global because that physical distance constraint is coming out of the equation. As a result, we’re seeing changes in audience makeup that that are really interesting that Lori said earlier. Audiences are tending to become larger and distributed across wider geographies and in some cases, industries and in some cases elevated in terms of level because more senior folks and now afford the time to to listen to the Thought Leadership.
Bill Sherman And go ahead, Lori.
Lori Zetlin I just want to jump in. I would say one takeaway, and this is from us, we did a survey of conference organizers and we were also talking to them all the time. And, you know, one major media publication who produces great conferences actually said to us this week, listen, we used to do this conference. We should do it in the U.S. We used to do it in Asia, and we used to do it in the Amea region. We’re now doing the same conference two times a year, and the whole world is going to be involved in this conference. And that’s a big change.
Bill Sherman Well, and think about how that impacts because it changes the flow of information. And instead of it flowing within a geography, the ideas flowing across the world at once because of intent attendees. And so if you have two potential touch points a year to reach out to an audience and share a message globally, that’s a lot easier than having to try and nurture 3 or 4 different conversations in different regions at once if you’re getting the right people in the audience. And so one of the things that I’ve been really amazed by is the transformation of how knowledge is flowing as a result of Covid. I think there’s a transformation that will sustain post-COVID, right? People see knowledge moving faster and they’re not going to want to go back.
Eric Zetlin Definitely, Bill. We are advising our clients. Our clients are asking us what’s going to happen with conferences as we get into the latter half of this year as we move into 2022. And based on our conversations with conference organizers in our observations over the last year, we strongly believe that first that fiscal conference will come back. And second, that virtual conferences won’t disappear because they carry many real benefits with them. So we’re talking about the hybrid conference world going forward, whether that actually starts in practice later this year or whether it takes a little bit longer, we’ll see as the pandemic evolves. But we’re confident that that there will be this hybrid approach that will hopefully offer the best of both worlds. It’s really important to get into a room physically when you can, when it’s safe with people, because there are unintended discussions and interactions that you can’t predict or plan for. And that’s really valuable that one of the main reasons why people go to conferences. But as we talked about earlier, there are so many benefits with the virtual environment that that both really have a lot to offer.
Bill Sherman Well, and think about it this way, in that someone has to look at it for an in-person event and say, Yeah, that’s worth multiple days of my time versus, I don’t have to go on a plane. I can listen to a few presentations. I can dip in and out from my workday and still be at my desk and still get some of the insights and experience the people who would say, Yeah, that’s worth two hours of my time to go hear that presentation. But not the rest of it. Those people are perfect for the virtual where they say there’s a couple of sessions, but it’s not worth three days of my time. And so what you’re doing is you’re expanding the audience for these opportunities and gives you the opportunity to reach people who would never have traveled to that conference.
Eric Zetlin Exactly.
Bill Sherman So as we begin to wrap up here, what I’d love to hear from both of you is a little bit of advice. So imagine you’re responsible and many of your clients are responsible for managing the the speaking component of an organization. Right. What have you seen that works well in curating speakers to audiences? What are the tips that someone in that role based on your experience? What should they be doing? What’s something that will help them?
Lori Zetlin I’ll start. I think that the best thing that somebody can do, there’s quite a few, but one is tell a story. Keep your audience engaged. Sell by not selling. If you’re going to be speaking and if if if selling is one of your the things you want to accomplish, if you are seen as a subject matter expert and you know what you’re talking about, then you’re going to be seen as as that thought leader, as someone who people want to talk to learn more from. So do not set do not sell by not selling. That’s number one.
Eric Zetlin And then I’ll chime in on top of that. When thinking about thought leadership and how speaking can tie into that goal. We urge communicators to think broader about their thought leadership campaign. For instance, speaking isn’t the only thing that a communicator should be doing. They should also be doing public relations and blog posts and writing and interacting with their audiences in a number of ways. And we call it integrated communications, where speaking is sometimes a specific sphere is what leads the charge all the time. This is a component that comes in from a from another angle. But the most effective leadership happens when all of these various media work in concert.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. And you have to meet your audience, your target audience, where they consume content in the manner that they want to consume it. Right. And so if you are naturally a writer and your audience listens to podcasts, you’ve got to be on podcast, right? Or if you’re not a writer, you have to find a way. Whether you got a ghostwriter or somebody’s coauthor with you to get that written material out. And so my build on what you said, Eric, is you don’t have to turn your voice, your thought leader, into a master of all communications methods. They can and do need support to help them handle an omni channel because otherwise it can feel daunting for them. Go. So I have to master Twitter TikTok speaking and I’ve got to write white papers. What are you. I’m not super person. Right?
Eric Zetlin Right. And oftentimes they’ll have a day job, too.
Bill Sherman Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And by the way, they do this between 8 and 11:00 at night because that’s when you’re writing your posts. Yeah.
Eric Zetlin That’s right. Exactly. Oftentimes, executives at larger companies will have teams that will help them with their social and public relations efforts. So that can be an effective way of managing some of that workload Bill. But for smaller organizations or individuals, it can be it can be a real challenge to balancing.
Bill Sherman And even if you’re in a larger organization, it’s keeping those on message on point and connected so that as you’re going across channels, it still sounds like the same voice correctly.
Eric Zetlin Yeah.
Bill Sherman So Lori and Eric, want to thank you for joining us today. If someone’s interested in learning more about you, how can they get in touch or where would they find you?
Lori Zetlin They can go to our website, which is www.speakerservices.net. They can email us at info at speakerservices.net. Eric and I are both on LinkedIn and we have an S3 LinkedIn page, so those are probably the best, the best and easiest ways to reach us.
Bill Sherman Wonderful. Thank you both.
Lori Zetlin Thank you so much, Bill.
Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
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