The last day of our Vanguard Summit in Prague is now in the history books. Another half day we had the pleasure to listen to several speakers and had many great discussions about products and features and where some when the cat bites his tail.
Day 3 Summary
How to become a community rockstar?
Christal and Dave Kawula from #TeamKawula are now on the stage, talking about how to become a community rockstar! Dave and Christal are the founders of the MVPDays which is the best IT conference by the IT community for the IT community. The MVPDays are currently an US-only event, but it’s planned to hold that conference worldwide. Looking forward to that! Both have written several books about things like PowerShell and Windows Server and are active in the IT community. With Dave, the Vanguards have a top speaker whose sessions are famous and were well awarded!
The title is king!
Christal and Dave showed us some stuff about getting motivated and staying motivated to do actual speaker sessions at a conference. First, the title is king! The event committee doesn’t have much time to evaluate the possible speakers and their sessions. If they see a good title, chances are high that they read also the abstract of your session, which makes it in turn more likely that they accept your session. Otherwise, you’re out already at that stage shortly after you’ve submitted your session for review.
Submit your session(s)
You should also submit more than one session. One point is that there are so many submissions, and if the committee is seeing several submissions with similar titles, your good title is more likely the one they will choose. And it is often the fact that event organizers are not allowed to have a single-session speaker. The more sessions you submit, the better your chances are to be selected.
Writing
Talking about your public persona/profile. Enhance it. A small website with all the relevant information about you isn’t that much effort. Conference committees often do research on speakers they don’t know before they finally accept them.
If you’re blogging, then you probably should think about using Grammarly. Especially if you’re not a native English speaking person, but you’re writing in English, it’s good to have a proper grammar. It looks more professional and it makes it easier to read and understand your blog posts. It’s free and you can even install it as a plugin for Google Chrome if you’re blogging with that browser. Why not giving it a chance?
Publish a book / several books!
Yes, that’s also a pro-tip! Write books! At least if you ever wrote a book, you know that it is a PITA. It takes a long time, you’re constantly in contact with the publisher and several other people, you send gazillions of drafts until they are happy. And probably the book is already outdated after release because the technology you were writing about was evolving during the write-up.
A great platform to publish your books is Leanpub. You can publish your book there even if it’s not yet finished! They only publish it as PDF documents. But that has one big advantage: you can constantly update your books and provide actual content to your readers! How cool is that?
if you fancy for the printed version of your book(s), then Amazon has a great service for you. With Amazon Create Space you can upload your book and let them print it for a bargain! And it is always a good idea to have some examples of your book with you if you’re attending a conference (where you probably also have a session…).
Create a good PowerPoint slide deck!
If you ever made a PowerPoint slide deck then you know that this can be frustrating sometimes. You’ve got the content ready (at least some), but you don’t know how to design the slides. The new PowerPoint version has some artificial intelligence (AI) in it which could help you with the design. This new feature is called PowerPoint Design Ideas.
PowerPoint Designer detects pictures, charts, or tables on your slides and gives you several suggestions for arranging them in a cohesive, attractive layout. The designer can also turn text such as lists, processes, or timelines into an easily readable SmartArt graphic. PowerPoint Designer watches also for key terms and concepts that it has illustrations for, and it shows you those illustrations in various layouts. The Illustrations are from the Office 365 icons library.
Now go out and become a community rockstar!
That’s it, folks!
That‘s it, folks! we‘re done! A huge thank you to RickVanover and his team for the organization of that awesome #VanguardSummit. A huge thank you as well to Veeam for your engagement with the community. #VeeamVanguard #VanguardTakeOver
And if you like to find out more about us and the Vanguard Summit 2018 in Prague, then just click the hashtags above to gather all the stuff on Twitter.
