SpeakerRate: an online community for reviewing and rating speakers | Social Signal

A few months ago, I left a conference thinking how great it would be if I could have checked up on the speakers beforehand: not just their bios, but their reputations for delivering engaging, useful and, yes, entertaining talks. From that spun out the idea for a site where anyone could rate speakers and their presentations. My back-of-the-napkin diagrams got pretty elaborate... before I filed them away in our now-bulging File Drawer O' Great Ideas.

Well, thankfully, someone else didn't file their napkins away. And the result is SpeakerRate: an online community for speakers, attendees and event organizers.

The core of the site, as you might guess, is rating speakers' talks. Speakers as well as attendees can comment on the talks, but only attendees can offer ratings: numerical scores on content and delivery.

And apart from the fact that individual talks can be part of larger events (such as conferences), that's pretty much the site. Fair enough: if this catches on, then being the place to review speakers is a pretty compelling proposition.

There are a few more features on the way too, judging by SpeakerRate's Get Satisfaction page. They're working on adding news feeds and mobile support (two of the more obvious gaps in the drywall). But while I salute their decision to launch with a light feature set that speaks to their core value, there's more that I hope they consider soon:

• Better content navigation. While there is a page that lists three well-reviewed and three recently-added speakers, as well as five speakers with upcoming gigs, that seems to be it as far as browsing speakers goes. If you want to find anyone else, you'll need to do it with the search feature. Much the same holds true for events and talks; browsing is very limited. Topic categories and tagging would also be helpful; tech talks currently rule the site, but if it's successful, that won't hold true for long and there could be a confusing mishmash of events.
• More qualitative speaker descriptions. The two rating dimensions, content and delivery, leave a lot of room for interpretation. And presentation styles are often a matter of taste, not numerical rating; for many audience members, "high-energy" and "motivational" would be just as repelling as they would be irresistible to others. Instead of forcing users to dive into the individual comments for a speaker, it would be handy if they could see some combination of structured keywords - tagging a talk as "funny", "informative" or "practical", for instance - and free tagging. And it would help that those keywords would be less vulnerable to gaming than raw numbers.
• An API. Get Satisfaction user Catherine Devlin points out that "Con organizers who want feedback for speakers can pre-enter the talk data into speakerrate to make it easier for attendees to rate... but for large cons (like this year's PyCon - over 100 talks and tutorials), nobody's going to do it by hand. if we could use a script against an API to enter the talks, it would become very plausible."
• Social and collaborative features. There's huge, huge power in connecting the offline and online worlds, and a site like this is poised to tap deeply into it. Let me indicate that I plan to attend a talk; let me see which of my friends are also attending; let the speaker talk with us beforehand to gauge everything from our level of knowledge to our expectations. And afterward, if she chooses, let the speaker ask for feedback on a particular aspect of her presentation.
• Video. This one should be high on the list. There are few better ways to assess a speaker than to see them in action... and assessing speakers (should I book her? should I attend his talk?) is the reason most visitors are probably going to be using the site. Conceivably, videos could be provided by the speaker, event organizer or attendees.

Where could a site like SpeakerRate go in the future? A lot of possibilities jump to mind - but it's not hard to imagine these:

• Partnering with event organizers to provide a detailed speaker evaluation platform.
• Creating widgets to add to an event's site or a speaker's social network profile. (A LinkedIn application seems like a natural step.)
• Selling paid profiles for speakers, with more detail, rich media and customization.
• Offering post-event discussion, wikis and media downloads.

However they proceed, SpeakerRate is already providing a potentially valuable service: to audience members, sure, but also to speakers. One of the toughest things in presenting is getting the kind of honest feedback that can help you improve, and understand why one talk foundered while another blew them away. SpeakerRate could turn into an important channel for creating better presentations and better presenters.

An even bigger picture could emerge from asking how SpeakerRate - or another site - could help build a sense of online community around these real-world events. Granted, some of the highly technical talks that occupy much of the site's current real estate probably wouldn't generate much social capital. But there are other gatherings where people make profound connections that could be sustained and strengthened afterward on the web - and then reinforced at subseqent events.

That's light years from a 3.5 for content and 4.2 for delivery. But it's at least as worth talking about.

I've created a profile for my recent keynote at Northern Voice, Teh Funny, on SpeakerRate. If you attended the keynote, please consider taking a moment to rate it, and help our ongoing assessment of the site. Thanks!