Self Marketing: An Adventure in Jazz
Mark Mzyk | September 16, 2009
Last night, as is no surprise to regular readers of this blog, I gave the presentation at the Raleigh.rb meetup.
My presentation was titled Self Marketing: An Adventure in Jazz
I thought it went well: the crowd was receptive, especially given it was a non-technical talk for a technical audience. Never sure how people will react to that.
Matthew Bass has updated the Raleigh.rb page with the slides from the talk in PDF format and under the Podcast section of the page you can find audio. Below I’ve embedded the slides from Slideshare, as well as a link to the slides as a PDF and included a link to the audio file. It should be easy enough for you to follow along at home if you so desire.
The presentation also featured a playlist of various jazz songs. With almost every slide I played about thirty seconds of a song. Thanks goes to Matthew Bass for capturing a screenshot of the playlist:
After the talk there was plenty discussion and I solicited opinions of the talk. Talks are rarely perfect, but sometimes it is difficult to get people to offer criticism. After some questioning, I received several critiques I’ve very glad to have received.
Ways my talk could have been improved:
- Smoother music transitions
- Include specific examples of good self marketing
- Don’t play music and attempt to talk over it
All of these are very valid points that I, as the presenter, wouldn’t have noticed. Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback, as it will help me make the talk stronger in the future.
Please look over the slides and take a listen to the audio and let me know what you think. While I realize it won’t be the same as watching the talk live, the change in format means you might find something I can improve that got overlooked while the talk was given live.
Also, if you have any examples of great self marketing (from individuals or small companies) let me know in the comments: your examples might make it into a future version of the talk.
Thanks to everyone who came to the talk – I appreciated you being there and hope you learned something from it.