7 Signs of Good Keynote Speaker

Finding a good keynote speaker for a conference is essential to encouraging engagement with and among participants in the same field of study and work.

As the number of conferences and events held is on the rise, you may find it easy to find a good speaker, but there are thousands of keynote speakers and many of them have nothing interesting to attract the audience.

Who is a Keynote Speaker?

The keynote is the most crucial part that establishes the framework of a programme, event, convention agenda or some other specific happenings involving talking.

The success of an event relies mostly on encouraging audiences to attend and engage in the event through effective speeches made by keynotes. The last thing you need is someone standing on the platform talking, like a statue that just repeats words and does nothing attractive for encouraging audience interaction.

To judge a keynote speaker, look at the qualities that inspire, educate, and entertain your audience, which considerably narrows down your options.

Features of a Great Keynote Speaker

What makes a great keynote speaker? A keynote speech sets the central theme of a conference. Many audiences consider the choice of keynote speakers to attend a special conference.  They believe the speakers create a framework for the main event and lend direction to the goals and purpose of the conference.

A keynote speaker sets the tone and summarizes the core theme of an event. Therefore, if you want a speaker who will inspire, educate and entertain the audience, choose someone who exhibits these important characteristics:

1. Leadership

A good keynote speaker is the leader of an event where he/she presents and delivers a speech. To lead the event in the right direction, the keynote speaker should resort to his/her leadership skills giving life to the event’s theme, inspiring and unifying the audience.

2. Humour

Humour is the key to keep an event away from being boring. Professional keynotes add humour as a spice to their presentation to encourage the audience to engage throughout the speech and the conference’s mood lively. A serious mood inherently surrounds any conference, but this doesn’t mean that they have to be boring. Humour can keep the audience awake and make them laugh, which in turn will deliver oxygen to the brain and release endorphins. It will help the audience engage in the event more.

3. Authenticity

A great keynote speaker must have his/her own unique speaking style.

4. Storytelling

Any audience or participant in an event needs engaging and memorable content to be presented by keynote speakers. A good speaker is a good storyteller to enable the audience to learn lessons and relate these lessons in their lives. An experienced and professional keynote speaker develops dynamic presentation styles to help the audience activate their senses and long-term memory.

5. Confidence

Successful people are confident public speakers! The audience attaches great importance to the confident speakers who appear credible, accurate, intelligent, believable and likeable. Confidence requires ample experience speaking in public, high knowledge of the topic, deep interest in subject matter, and the goal of the conference.

6. Brevity

A good keynote speaker avoids overloading the audience with an excess of information. In order to deal with the audience’s limited attention span, the speaker gets to the essence of his/her speech and delivers it confidently, clearly, and authentically.

7. Charisma

Webster defines charisma as “that special spiritual power or personal quality that gives an individual influence or authority over large numbers of people.” A great keynote speaker must be charismatic. Charismatic speakers are self-confident, assured, honest, well mannered and likeable and leave a strong and lasting impression on the audience that makes them come back for more and feel connected with the event, feeling happy and uplifted.

Canadian Institute for Knowledge Development (CIKD) will hold its three upcoming conferences,  3rd International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Management (IE), 4th International Conference on New Directions in Business, Management, Finance, and Economics (ICNDBM), and 2nd International Conference on Computer Science, Communication and Information Technology (CSCIT), in Turkey, Istanbul, in February 2020.

Following is a summary of keynote speakers in each conference:

CIKD Keynotes

4th ICNDBM

Luigi Guis: He is Axa Professor of Household Finance at the Einaudi Institute for Monetary, Banking and Financial Studies in Rome. He has been listed in the 2016 “World’s most influential scientific minds” list compiled by Reuters.

Ilhan Ozturk: He is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Economics. He has many administrative tasks and is the author of numerous articles on the scholarly journals and also the editor and referee in various.

Luis Alberiko Gil-Alaña: He is a Faculty Fellow of the Navarra Center for International Development and Professor of Econometrics and Quantitative Methods in the School of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Navarra.

2nd CSCIT

Wolfgang Karl Härdle: He is born on October 20, 1953, in Darmstadt and is a German statistician, director of the Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz Chair of Statistics, and university professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the Humboldt University in Berlin since 1992.

Maurizio Lenzerini: He is a professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the Università di Roma La Sapienza, Italy, where he is currently leading a research group on Artificial Intelligence and Databases. His main research interests are in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Ontology languages, Semantic Data Integration, and Service Modeling.

Dr. Huiru (Jane) Zheng: She is a Reader in Computer Science at Ulster University and a Visiting Professor at Fuzhou University, China. Zheng is an active researcher in healthcare informatics, including bioinformatics and medical informatics.

IE Conf.

Ram Ramanathan: He is a professor of Operations Management and Director, BMRI. Ram worked at the division of Operations Management and Information Systems at Nottingham University Business School, where he was an associate professor and divisional research director, and successfully completed a research project aimed at understanding how environmental regulations and other pressures force UK manufacturing firms to improve their environmental performance. In the past, Ram has worked in various parts of the world, including India, Oman and Finland.

Vikas Kumar: He is director of research and professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at Bristol Business School, the University of the West of England, UK.