Author: shehackspurple

Many people who are aspiring to become a public speaker ask me how to conduct themselves on social media or promote a talk once they have been accepted to speak somewhere. Having been a professional musician for a long time before I worked in InfoSec, I am used to trying to promote my events and set myself and my art apart from others. With this in mind, I humbly offer the following suggestions to help you gain social media followers or attract people to your events or work.

• Tweet about your events and your work! Share on LinkedIn! Talk about what you are doing and what you want to bring attention to. Send a tweet to your followers to tell them what’s new in your work, research you’ve released, or an article you have written. If you are doing things you are proud of in your professional life, you should tell people about them.
• Send a tweet to other speakers at the same conference that you are speaking at, congratulating them or telling them you are looking forward to their talk (note, only do this if it’s true). I know I love it when people congratulate me, so why not do that for others?
• General rule: never tweet or say or act in a way that is not genuine to who you really are. Don’t fake it; people can tell, and it’s a huge turn off. I know that I’m a giant nerd who is overly enthusiastic, obsessed with security and sometimes awkward. I own who I am, and people tend to think it’s adorable. If they don’t like it, they were never going to like me anyway; those aren’t the followers/connections/friends that I’m looking for. If you make your personal brand the real you, it’s much easier to ensure that you never step out from your brand and alienate the people who follow you.
• Always do major announcements (conference appearance, project release, etc.) on ALL of your social media. Don’t just announce it on one platform, use at least two. Do it on ALL social media that you have available to you. (PS you should use at least two forms of social media.)
• Don’t be as chatty on LinkedIn as on Twitter, it’s not the platform for that. 🙂
• Don’t use Twitter and LinkedIn the same way you use Facebook. Facebook is for personal connections, and some professional things. LinkedIn is professional only. Twitter can be a mix. Don’t post 100 photos per day of your family, your lunch or your dog on your Twitter or LinkedIn account and then wonder why you have no professional followers. If you work in InfoSec, and you are trying to get people interested in the research or other work that you are doing, why are you tweeting photos of your French fries that you just ordered? Rare personal tweets are okay, but you have to remember that’s not what people are following you for….
• Don’t comment on women’s appearance, attractiveness or bodies in a professional setting or social media. If I post a photo of myself giving a talk and someone comments how attractive I am it embarrasses me and makes me uncomfortable. It makes me wonder if how I look is more important than my research to some people, and I know many other women feel this way as well. If you want to compliment a woman, I highly suggest you compliment her on her work, achievements or something else professional. “Great talk!”, “Awesome article”, “You were so powerful on stage!”, “Highly informative”, “Great ideas!” etc. are all something anyone would be happy to see as a comment online.
• If possible, involve other people in your events. For instance, do a workshop with a friend, or write an article with someone who works in the same field as you. Organize a meetup with multiple speakers. It will bring more attention to the whole thing. It’s also usually more fun, and if there are technical issues you have backup. Plus, you have someone else to help you create the content or run the event, it’s win-win. It is also a good way to give a platform to someone else who has less followers, but who you want to see succeed.
• Ask to be on podcasts that relate to your area of interest. Tell them the topic that you want to talk about, make it easy for them by having a story ready. Announce it on social media. Always announce everything on social media.
• Reach out to the newspapers or blogs and see if they want to write an article about you/the conference. Try to have a story or interesting angle ready for them, so that the story writes itself. They are more likely to say yes if you have a good idea for a story.
• Plan other local events in conjunction with a large event (such as speaking at a conference) and give a different talk than the one you are doing at the conference (never do the same talk, in the same city, the same week). If you are doing a DevOps related talk, there’s almost always a DevOps meetup, same for OWASP (appSec), .Net users’ group, Cloud and so on. The bigger the city, the more options you will have. If you can get two different groups to co-host it (for instance the DevOps and OWASP meetups hosting a DevSecOps talk) that’s even better. Don’t forget to announce it on social media.
• Add something personal to your talk, if you feel comfortable. “War stories” are always well received. For instance, if you are giving advice that people should always encrypt their hard drives, share a story about when an unencrypted hard drive was stolen that illustrates the reason why you are offering this advice. People like knowing the secrets of what goes on behind the scenes, and that you are a real person. But don’t get too personal though, no over-sharing, that can have the opposite effect.
• When at an event where you are presenting, ask someone to take photos of you. Share one of the images online after and thank the conference for having you. Saying thank you is never a bad thing. Save good photos to help promote future events.
• Live tweet other people’s talks (again, only if you actually like it). Give compliments (publicly and/or privately) when people deserve them. If a talk looks cool, comment that the talk looks cool. If you feel someone’s project or research is impressive, tweet at them to tell them that it’s impressive. It’s not only a nice thing to do, it adds visibility to what you do and boosts your image of being positive and nice to work with. Again, win-win!
• Never tweet/share on social bad things about other professionals in your field. Talk to them directly if you have a problem. I try to treat others how I would want to be treated, and I would much rather handle things like that privately.
• Don’t respond to trolls unless you have something incredibly good ready and you have thought about what the response will be. Always proceed with caution with interacting with someone who’s willing to act like that online. Staying away is usually best.
• People love images, post related images if possible, with the conference/event/project/article/video tagged. Always tag the thing you are trying to promote. Feel free to tag people who will be involved as well.
• If you see a news article that relates to your talk share it, with comments that you will cover this topic in more depth at your talk/presentation.
• If people tweet at you or reach out to you on social media, unless it’s negative, “like” their comment and respond positively whenever you have time. People like to be acknowledged, I know I do.
• Whenever possible, show kindness, patience and respect to others, both publicly and privately. This is a general tip, but it really makes life much better no matter what you do or who you are. 🙂

I hope this helps! Please reach out with questions or any suggestions of your own. I’d love to hear your feedback.

For content like this and more, check out my book, Alice and Bob Learn Application Security and my online training academy, We Hack Purple!

Many people ask me about how to become a better speaker. Below are some tips that I have for all of you. I hope they help!

Spoiler alert: my advice is not very exciting. I do not have a secret recipe, it’s mostly just a lot of hard work and practice.

My first suggestion is that you practice in front of your friends, colleagues, and anyone else that you trust. Practice many times. Ask for feedback each time. Take the feedback seriously, and change your talk accordingly.

When you feel ready, speak at a meetup. Then another one. Then another one. Speak at work if you are allowed. Speaking to smaller groups will give you more confidence, and people will begin to know who you are in your city. I also speak at work as much as they will tolerate. 🙂 The more practice you get, the better speaker you will be.

One you feel that you have mastered speaking at a meetup, you can try to move on to bigger things, like conferences.

When you apply for a conference, have someone you trust review your abstract and your talk outline. I usually write the entire talk before I apply, but I know many others do not do this and still do very well at it. Get feedback from as many people who work in your field as possible, you want to make sure it is interesting and will make the conference organizers interested in what you have to say. Include as much research and reference material as possible in your outline. This is your chance to prove that you know what you are talking about.

When you are accepted to a conference, practice even more than before! You want to ensure that you impress the people who invited you to speak, so put as much work into practicing as you can. I practice many hours for every conference, and it really pays off. When I am up there I am much less nervous, because I have done it so many times before, in front of so many people.

That’s right. When I speak, I am usually nervous too.

Super secret trick that I do: I practice all of my new talks in front of the Ladies Code Meetup in Ottawa. They are a very small, incredibly supportive and warm audience. They are so very, very lovely, and forgiving when I make errors or something does not go well. If you have a very small audience that you trust to do a “test run” on, this is ideal. I’m extremely grateful that they let me “practice on them” regularly. 😀

Other thoughts:

• If you get bad feedback about a joke, perhaps don’t use it. Especially when speaking in your second or third language. It’s much better to not be funny, then to have it backfire; I have learned that I am not good at being funny in French…. The hard way. It’s best to not offend.
• When you put a bunch of words on the screen the audience will read the words. We can’t help it! So try to have a picture, talk about your idea, then have words. This is a personal preference, but I find it helps.
• Consider including a diverse set of people in your slides. Most Meme Generators (if you use those) only have white people, and mostly men for technology images. Why not have all ages, races, shapes and sizes? Because that’s what people actually look like.
• Try to speak a bit slower than normal. Many people speak very quickly when they are nervous, so if you try to pronounce a little better and speak slightly slower, you will probably be very easy for everyone to understand. Drink water if that helps you remember to slow down. This is especially important if 1) you are giving a talk that is not in your first language and 2) if you are speaking to an audience that does have the first first same language as you are speaking in (for instance, if you are giving a talk in English, in Japan). Being understood is more important that anything else.
• Don’t be afraid to apply or be rejected. My submissions are rejected ALL THE TIME. Don’t get let down. It’s okay. Just apply again. Because eventually, they will say YES! And each time you do this process you will improve.
• Always listen to feedback and consider it, but you don’t have to “take” all of the feedback. If three times you hear “You talk too fast”, you should probably talk slower. But if you hear one time “Maybe you should do X” and “X” doesn’t make any sense to you, just say thank you and feel free to not follow that advice.
• Be open to feeback. Constructive feedback is a gift that someone is giving to you to help you improve. Try not to act defensive. Try to be open.
• If someone asks a question that you don’t know the answer to, don’t make something up. You are allowed to say “I don’t know, that’s not my area of expertise” or “I’m not sure, I’ve never thought of that before, does any else have any thoughts on this?”. You don’t have to know everything in the universe, although you should definitely know as much as possible about your topic.
• If someone is arguing with you or giving you a hard time during question period tell them you would like to continue the discussion after, and in the meantime you want to have give other people a chance to ask questions. Then meet them after and let them argue. You still have to talk to them (unless they are extremely rude, it is not your duty to be abused). I find that quite often people like that are just having trouble forming the question properly to express what they want to say, and when there is no spotlight on them it goes better. Also: I often learn something.
• Please don’t be afraid to try. Believe it or not the first time someone suggested that I do a talk I said “Oh no, not ME!”. And look at me now. You can do this, it will just take a lot of hard work.

I hope these suggestions help you!

For content like this and more, check out my book, Alice and Bob Learn Application Security and my online training academy, We Hack Purple!