Until just a few months ago almost all conferences brought many people together into large venues, with captivating keynote speakers as drawcards and to set the tone of the event.
Now almost all events are virtual, creating a very different dynamic for both audiences and speakers.
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As a keynote speaker it is essential to have a good showcase video that potential clients can watch to get a feel for your style. Virtually every keynote speaking client I’ve had for the last few years has watched mine.
My previous keynote speaker showcase video was getting rather dated, and it’s been long overdue for me to create a new one.
I’ve finally finished my new showcase video, after trawling through many videos of my keynotes, and selecting highlights to include.
Please check out my new showcase video below:
Let me know any thoughts or feedback!
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I have been a professional speaker for over 18 years, alongside the various entrepreneurial endeavors that have kept me busy over the last couple of decades.
It is a great privilege. Speaking is a truly wonderful way to make a living. I get to travel all around the world, having done paid speaking engagements in 30 countries so far. I learn in every engagement, in preparing to do the best job possible each time and by being exposed to a wonderful diversity of people, organizations, and industries. And I love the performance of professional speaking, stemming from my younger days as a musician.
However speaking must be done with purpose.
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I was recently interviewed by Nikolay Malyarov of digital newspaper aggregator PressReader for their industry magazine The Insider.
The transcribed interview appears as an extended article Platforms are the Future of Media, which goes into depth on some of the issues I see in the future of media. Below are a few brief excerpts, but read the full article for more detail.
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Many people aspire to be professional speakers, traveling the world, sharing their stories and insights, with audiences hanging on their every word.
However, many more people desire to become professional speakers than those who actually succeed on that path. What have those who have thrived in this career done to achieve their objective?
Professional keynote speaker and futurist Ross Dawson shares five critical steps that have helped him gain the experience, insight and authority to have been invited to deliver hundreds of highly successful keynote presentations across 28 countries.
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Before my recent keynote at CeBIT on Platform Strategy: Creating Exponential Value in a Connected World I did a video interview with Alex Zaharov-Reutt of ITWire, shown below. The full article and video is available on ITWire.
It was a very broad-ranging interview, however one of the topics I touched on was the concluding point of my keynote that afternoon, on governments as platforms.
I have written before about issues such as the role of crowdsourcing in government, how crowdfunding could shift the shape of taxation and government, how we can envisage the future of government as a solution enabler, and the value of a framework for the Transformation of Government.
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During Australian Healthcare Week on March 15-17, I will be delivering two keynotes on the future of healthcare, at the Health Facilities Design & Development conference and the Healthcare Efficiency Through Technology conference.
In the lead-up to the conference, an article Healthcare 2020: what will the future of healthcare look like in Australia? draws on an interview with me to explore this space. Below are just a few excerpted quotes from the extensive interview with me:
Every organization understands they need to innovate, not just in bringing new offerings to market, but in continually becoming a new and better organization.
Networks are always at the heart of innovation. The new comes from combining the old in original ways.
Chemist Kary Mullis aptly described how he arrived at his innovations that won him the Nobel Prize in 1993:
“I put together elements that were already there, but that’s what inventors always do. You can’t make up new elements, usually. The new element, if any, it was the combination, the way they were used.”
Whether it is bringing together existing ideas to create new ideas, or connecting people in ways that generate new insights, organizations must design how they work to facilitate value-generating connections.
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I recently did the opening keynote on Creating the Future of News at the International News & Media Association World Congress in New York, which brought together over 400 senior news executives from 45 countries.
Below is a video excerpt of the opening minutes of my keynote.
You can see a video of the complete keynote here, and the static presentation slides here (though much of my visual presentation was video).
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Some events today have innovative formats and strong audience participation. However many conferences still sport essentially the same format as ever, a series of people presenting on a stage in front of a passive audience. It needn’t be this way. Technology eenables us to re-conceive what a presentation is and can be.
I approach this idea as both a speaker and an event organizer. I have been a professional speaker for over 15 years, and have also organized many conferences and events, including our Future of Media Summits, the first cross-continental conferences ever held.
A recent article in Sydney Morning Herald on how the new app Zeetings helps “keep audiences awake” looks at Zeetings, “a presentation app that is both interactive and social, and promises to stop audiences slumbering in their chairs.”
The article describes the background of the app and goes on to quote me:
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