I’m going to post this (short) blog a little earlier in the day in case you’re heading off early for the 4th.   Yesterday I talked about how important a good introduction is for setting up a speaker for success.  Today I’m going to offer you a way to guarantee that happens every time. 

If you’re a speaker, you’ve been down this road:  you get introduced by a VP of Marketing, and he starts by saying, “I’m not going to read the intro they sent me.”  That’s the intro you’ve carefully prepared.  He adds some irrelevant comments about how he met you the evening before over the Spilled Bloody Mary Incident (his fault, not yours).  What’s supposed to be charming self-deprecating humor is awkward and goes on too long.  The rest of the ad-libbed introduction gets lost in the verbal shuffle, and the VP gets key facts wrong, stumbling over the sentence structure and some unfamiliar words.  He leaves out mention of your book, and ends with another half-hearted attempt at humor.  You walk on stage to the sound of a lot of single hands clapping. 

In order to avoid this sort of disastrous incident, which happens more often than you’d believe possible, create a DVD intro that creates some drama and excitement, puts you in the best possible light, and gets the audience keyed up to see you.  You can do this in a carefully scripted 3-minute video, and the cost can be quite reasonable.  In any case you should mentally amortize the cost over all the introductions that won’t be botched from here on. 

What should go into those 3 minutes?  Answer the question why?  — Why are you cool, why is your speech important, why should the audience care.  Give a few salient details about your accomplishments, and end with the music amped up and the cheers already rolling in.  Have the last words of the voice over be, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome (You)!”  and the applause will follow naturally.  The great thing about video (with a compelling soundtrack) is that it can touch the emotions in a way that’s much harder for the VP of Marketing to do, statistically speaking. 

It’s all about quality control.  Create your own intro DVD and you’ll never have to suffer a botched intro again. 

Happy Fourth!