
When Nobody Shows Up to My Conference Talk - ingve
http://davidbisset.com/when-nobody-shows-up-to-my-conference-talk/
======
devchix
Not a conference, but once, I wrote a book. The local bookstore, bless them,
staged a meet-the-authors, tech talk. I showed up two hours early, lugging a
suitcase with extra books. Cookies and lemonade were laid out, along with
pristine pens and pads, chairs in perfect alignment. A very nice, gentle old
lady showed up early. I was hopeful. I soon discovered she was retired and
occupied her time by going to these library things. We gamely began our
prepared talk. Half an hour later another person wandered in. He was probably
homeless and was there for the lemonade and cookies. This very kind pair
stayed until the end and even asked some questions -- that had nothing to do
with the subject, and I doubt they understood a thing I said.

~~~
htk
It's great that you can talk about this with humor (I actually laughed out
loud and had to explain to my wife what it was about). I hope you can see that
the event had nothing to do with the quality of your work, and more than that,
it shouldn't make you question writing it in the first place.

------
chrisseaton
I've given talks where I think at the time that we'd have been better off
giving everyone in the audience a cheque for $500 to read our blog post rather
than fly me to the US for a week.

But then one person in the audience likes what they hear or asks a really
insightful question, and then next year they're giving their own talk about
your work because they're using it and you realise it was worth it.

And I think a counterpoint to this, as a conference attendee, is that if you
walk by a room and it's embarrassingly empty, then jump in, make eye contact
with the speaker while they're talking, and ask a good question afterward, to
help them out.

~~~
aeternus
There must be a better format than conference talks. They are a significant
commitment for both the presenter and the audience. Both must make the choice
to attend before knowing details of the content, and it reaches a relatively
small audience.

I'd much rather see a format where talks can be viewed or subscribed to
individually, rated, and open to feedback/discussion.

~~~
blunte
This is basically life in general. We often don’t know if an outcome is going
to be worth it, so we either take chances or do nothing reasoning that it
probably would have been a waste of time.

One of those approaches is guaranteed to never get anything.

~~~
jonny_eh
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

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ghaff
Especially when you get into multi-day conferences with multiple tracks and
things like evening events, it's easy to create "death slots." The slot right
before the party on the last day of the conference, a morning slot after the
party on the final half-day, a breakout slot before the keynote, or a breakout
at the same time as one or two hugely popular speakers. I've sometimes been
surprised by how _many_ people have attended sessions of mine in clearly
pretty awful time slots.

I'd argue that there are some practices that are sub-optimal but it's really
hard to avoid some time slots being inherently better than other. And TBH to
the degree that having sub-optimal time slots means there can be more speaker
slots, that's not necessarily a bad tradeoff for a lot of speakers.

~~~
rdiddly
Don't forget "at the same time as the big keynote" for example.

~~~
ghaff
Fortunately, I haven't seen that too often given that conferences typically
want to fill up their keynote seats.

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callumprentice
In the early 80s I got an, at the time, revolutionary new, inexpensive home
computer and brought it along to the local university computer club monthly
meetup. It created an awful lot of interest and I was asked to give a "short
informal talk to a few people" at the next event. I declined countless times
but eventually I was persuaded to do it - after all, How Hard Could It Be? I
turned up the next month and got asked to report to LT2 whatever that was..
LECTURE THEATER 2!! must have been 400 people in there. I'd like to say I gave
an insightful, detailed presentation on the hardware and software aspects of
the device. I did not. I was so nervous that I don't even remember most of it
but I am sure it was simply awful. Since then, I've never been able to speak
in public in any shape or form. Getting help or training is on my bucket list
of things to do one day but as much as I want to improve, the idea of it
literally makes me quake.

~~~
f_allwein
Check out Toastmasters then - it helped me a lot.
[https://www.toastmasters.org/](https://www.toastmasters.org/)

~~~
ay
A book “confessions of a public speaker” has quite a few very nice and useful
anecdotes and tips.

And a random personal anecdote:

I had a really difficult time even at toastmasters dealing with my Uhms and
Umms. Having someone count them somewhat works, but I decided to experiment by
just watching my daily speech to be the same “quality” as public speech, and
try to suppress the garbage words even during no-stress moments.

It took maybe half a year of practice, but as a result I started to speak
slower and (probably :) clearer in the day to day life, and this during the
public speaking too, with zero effort.

Edit-append: the most useful exercise is taking the projector, presenting in
an empty room as if for the crowd, recording this “from a seat” and watching
yourself. Extremely weird at first, but you very quickly see the areas to
focus on. And since you must rehearse any talk anyway several times (at least
that is the case for me), it is a zero-cost and high return activity.

~~~
callumprentice
Sounds like great advice - thanks. I did have to give a (kind of) public talk
recently and it wasn't great but one of the things you mentioned helped me a
lot - namely, slow down. I felt like I was talking much too slowly at first
but slowly realized it was okay.

~~~
ay
Happy if it will be of use!

There are two things at play with being too fast:

first, you know what you are talking about (thus are giving a talk) - and tend
to want to give as much info as possible.

the second, and more important one, is the adrenaline rush that every
performance gives.

It probably is this:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachypsychia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachypsychia)

Consequently rehearsals help (they remove the worry about what to say)

Also one thing that helped me a lot is taking “dominant” poses five minutes
before getting on stage. I can’t find the study that claimed it to work - but
it did.

Later I have read the research that had claimed it didn’t work -
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28946020/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28946020/)
is one of the studies I could find quickly, but for me this technique still
works, so maybe it’s the power of the placebo :)

------
blakesterz
This was a good collection of speaking tips.

"I was the last talk of the last day. Only about a dozen people attended that
talk."

From the title I thought literally NOBODY showed up. I've done talks at 8am on
Saturday in a room built for several hundred people where only about a dozen
showed up and it didn't even occur to me to be upset. I was surprised & happy
that many people showed up! I guess my expectations are low.

~~~
ghaff
I once had a talk where literally one person showed up. (Years ago, for a
sponsor talk I got stuck with that had very little to do with the event.) We
had a nice conversation though :-)

Dozen people or so? So long as at least a few of them are paying attention,
I'm fine with that. I've had small audiences where I've ended up chatting with
people for 30 minutes afterwards. I'm fine with that.

------
CaliforniaKarl
In case the site gets overwhelmed:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisse...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisset.com/when-
nobody-shows-up-to-my-conference-talk/)

~~~
Jump3r
Good call, database couldn't keep up

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dimensionmedia
I'm the author of this post. I just wanted to say even with the embarrassment
of my site going down (the blog was on a $5/month Digital Ocean plan, never
figured I would write something only my mother would read).

I'm reading through your comments. Thank you for sharing your insights and
stories. Would love to do a follow up post at some point.

~~~
jimhefferon
A small point: "weigh" on them.

~~~
dimensionmedia
Thank you! There's a billion typos in there, you just seeing the tip of the
iceberg.

------
theNJR
When you are hustling to raise a seed round, you end up at some strange
conferences.

I was invited to speak at a VR conference last minute a few years back. It was
a good opportunity so I flew out to SF (from LA) for the day. My company had
just finished research that would be interesting to the attendees and,
frankly, positioned my startup in a strong light in front of the niche
investors who I hoped would be there.

This was so last minute that I didn’t even have a deck completed. Instead of
going to the first half of the conference I holed up in a coffee shop and
worked on the presentation. When I get to the conference it is the end of the
day so I don’t bother checking in.

I head to the room where I’m to speak and watch the second half of that
prevention. He leaves. It’s 5pm. The room clears out and I setup. I never like
that small conference, self-service mad-dash to hook into HDMI and hope the
connectors work, but all is well and I’m ready to go on time.

No one enters.

Literally not one person.

I poke my head out and people are milling about, you can tell it’s time to go
home. I notice the sign in front of the room that lists the presentations. I’m
not on it. The one prior was the last of the night.

So I wheel the TV out into the hallway and present to everyone and no one all
at once. I’m good at projecting my voice and actually drew in 10 or so people
for the entire presentation. I carnival barked at investors I recognized (from
their LinkedIn. I made flash cards of them, we’d never actually met) and sort
of captured their attention. Security thinks about saying something. I run
through my talk, someone even asks a question and that was that.

Somehow the organizers never actually booked me. They said they did, it just
never made its way to the program. Had I gone to registration to get a badge I
would have learned that fact earlier. It’s probably for the best that I
didn’t.

This story would have been awesome if I found a lead investor from it, but in
the end that company didnt work out. It is my favorite conference story
though, with my presentation to an entirely Chinese-speaking audience coming
in second. Good times.

~~~
skinnymuch
Haha very cool!

------
ErikAugust
In another life, I was in a hip hop group. We did shows up and down New
England. Once in a while, we did shows for 100 - 200 people. Often we did
shows for 20 - 30 people.

One time, we booked a show in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. We asked a few other
acts to play, and they all came in from 50 - 100 miles away. We promoted the
show beforehand using all the normal channels we used, and even handed out
fliers at other local shows.

The acts all show up. The bartender shows up. The sound person shows up. No
one else rolls in. We wait, but nothing. Not a single paying entrant after a
couple hours.

All the acts performed anyway. And nobody ended up showing up.

------
eschneider
Even if the room's near empty, you never can tell how many people will watch a
recorded conference talk online.

I don't know about other folks, but I can rarely get out to conferences for
time/money/family reasons, but I'll often watch the talks online.

If you give a good talk and it's recorded and online, with luck you'll
eventually find an audience.

------
unstatusthequo
I speak publicly a bit more than monthly from groups of 50 to over 400. When I
have the last slot, I make sure do a few things:

1) make the title salacious as I can; 2) engage those "survivors" more. In the
past when in Vegas I've ordered a tray of drinks and offered them up as prizes
for participating (this also works during early morning session of the last
day of a big conference... Highest rated session lol); 3) depending on size
(like less than 50) give them things I wouldn't necessarily give to a captive
huge group, like templates, checklists, etc. 4) make damn sure my content is
exciting. This means making especially not boring slides. Give them a progress
bar at the bottom. 5) be more conversational, especially if it's less than 50.

Anyway, my few cents ;)

------
brightball
The best way for a conference to address this is to put a headline level
general talk in place to close out the conference. It gets people to hang
around specifically for that big talk which will keep people from leaving
early if the last day is only track talks.

~~~
ghaff
At least for a single day conference, it can work pretty well to have a "name"
close out a conference because, as you say, people who might have been
inclined to skip the last breakout or two otherwise to beat the traffic will
end up sticking around.

The challenge at multi-day conferences is that it's just a reality that many
people will take off early for travel and other reasons. So any big talk you
put in the end may get some more people in seats at breakout but is also going
to attract fewer people, less coverage, etc. than it would earlier in the
event.

~~~
brightball
The last Elixir Conf I went to pulled this off on a multi day and it was very
effective.

------
JoeAltmaier
I was scheduled to talk at an InfiniBand conference. The day arrived - and my
talk was cancelled. By the sponsoring organization Microsoft. Because I was
going to talk about deficits in interface specifications. Microsoft hadn't
fleshed out their plans in that regard, and didn't want anybody talking about
it without their marketing message being foremost. They were paying for the
conference, after all.

But it left a bad taste in my mouth.

~~~
ghaff
At least from the surface, that's just really poor event management. Sometimes
"stuff" does indeed happen but, in general, whoever was choosing talks should
have been aware of potential landmines. Disinviting people has a pretty high
bar if it's from a change of strategy on my end.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
To be honest I was aware they were reluctant to talk app-layer interfaces.
They were hoping to 'capture' InfiniBand similar to how video was captured
with DirectX.

Once I submit and paper and was accepted, I assumed they'd relented. But day
one of conference I was gone from the schedule - the session time slot was
blank.

------
CaliforniaKarl
> Also realize that many WordCamps and conferences record talks and those are
> usually available to the public web, where many others can discover and view
> them.

This. I've only given one real conference talk—a lightning talk at Globus
World 2019—but I do wish I had a recording of it.

~~~
ghaff
It can be a bit hard without talking to an audience (at least it is for me)
but consider just recording a talk at home--if only with your phone--and
putting it on YouTube, etc. I'd actually argue that if you can make a 10
minute or so version that's probably better for online than an hour talk
recorded at an event.

------
zwieback
Not exactly the same thing but we have a family band and play at various low-
key events, we've been on stage where there have been maybe 10 people in the
audience and they were probably all organizers or vendors who had booths at
the event. We still try to give it our best each time but it can be awkward.

------
softwaredoug
Talks to smaller groups can be more fulfilling. Lots of 1-1 engagement, and
the audience is much more engaged and truly cares about the topic. Real
relationships are formed.

Sometimes to an audience with 100s half the people are on their laptop or
phone. And can’t give you feedback as they listen to your talk.

------
bobcall
[http://archive.is/AnPhc](http://archive.is/AnPhc)

------
calhoun137
Better title: "When everyone shows up on my website"

~~~
dimensionmedia
"When someone outside of my mother and children show up on my website" would
be more like it (i'm the author, trust me on that).

------
quickben
"Error establishing a database connection"

Well, maybe most people can't even access what his events are about?

~~~
snitch182
The server probably went over capacity ...

~~~
adenner
the wayback machine and google search cache are also empty as well...

~~~
frosted-flakes
Here's a link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisse...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190521202928/http://davidbisset.com/when-
nobody-shows-up-to-my-conference-talk/)

------
mewse-hn
"Error establishing a database connection"

When Nobody Can Read My Essay About Nobody Showing Up to My Conference Talk

~~~
sneak
Wordpress is like seatbelts that appear normal, but fail open in a crash.

~~~
bArray
Every time I get "Error establishing a database connection", it's a WordPress
server. The worst part is that there's usually hardly any interactivity on
these sites, they could have just as easily been statically served.

------
hawaiianbrah
Error establishing a database connection.

------
ElijahLynn
Error establishing database connection.

