I’ve talked before how different my job is today than it was pre-pandemic. The cost of our service is about 30% of what it was before — and it’s 10 times harder to facilitate. Here’s how it worked before…
Client wants speaker at event. Speaker is booked, contract is created. Pre-event requests consist of a headshot, marketing bio, presentation overview, and sometimes a 1-minute pre-event video to post on the client’s website. Logistics — hotel, ground, flights — are confirmed and info provided to the meeting planner. We get paid 7 days before the speaker gets on the plane. Speaker checks in hotel and goes downstairs for a 5-minute tech check with the hotel’s production team and delivers the presentation 30-minutes later. Here’s how it works now…
Client wants speaker at event but wants to pay a minimal amount of money since it’s not an in-person event. (I get that.) Speaker is booked, contract is created… and recreated over and over because there may or may not be a separate technical producer. The expertise of presenters at virtual events is so varied, clients feel the need to stress horizontal capture using a “light ring” and external mic. (In other words, speakers don’t know they can’t just talk for 90 minutes into their iPhone. My speaker has studio lighting, a switcher, a document camera and more.) Next, because it’s virtual, the client wants to just send the presentation out to everyone — or post it on their public website — without consideration of copyrighted material. I could go on and on…
What used to take a phone call and maybe 5 email exchanges has evolved into multiple calls and email conversations. For example, there’s a March 16th event where I’ve already exchanged over 50 emails with the meeting planner. And then… rather than manage everything through our speaker calendar, the client and/or meeting planner/speaker bureau wants to send out meeting invites for every single thing. This translates to multiple instances of the exact same event or call within our system and multiple emails regarding that. (Latest tech call resulted in 22 ‘accepted’ response emails.) Hey… if it’s a “meeting” everyone gets a “meeting invite.” It’s a cluster!
But we got snow yesterday — and that was awesome!
A snow day locally even though we didn’t get nearly as much white stuff as I’d hoped for. Still, it was just enough to keep me from losing my ever lovin’ mind! No school means you don’t have to brush your hair before visiting your Nana. Coco the Hobo. 🙂
The good news it is FRIDAY! The bad news is this morning it’s 19 degrees at just after 10:00 AM. Brrrr!
No short “Today I Learned,” but instead an article that you might want to read if you’re concerned about your digital privacy, security and more — like we ALL should be: Apple comes out swinging against Facebook over data privacy>>