What Makes a Stand-Out Conference Speaking Proposal and Presentation with Cathy McPhillips: Podcast Ep. 388

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Carol Cox:
You're going to learn how to make your conference speaking proposals and presentation stand out with my guest, Cathy McPhillips of the Marketing AI Institute, on this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast.

Carol Cox:
More and more women are making an impact by starting businesses, running for office and speaking up for what matters. With my background as a TV political analyst, entrepreneur and speaker, I interview and coach purpose driven women to shape their brands, grow their companies, and become recognized as influencers in their field. This is speaking your brand, your place to learn how to persuasively communicate your message to your audience.

Carol Cox:
Hi everyone! Welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. I'm your host, Carol Cox. Today we're going to talk about how to create a speaking submission for a conference or event that stands out so that you get selected by the conference organizers. One of the things that I miss the most in the first couple of years of the pandemic was actually attending conferences. I love the buzz and the energy of being around lots of different people from different places, meeting new people, figuring out what they're working on, whether it's in business or marketing or technology for me. And so I was really excited to attend MAICON, the Marketing AI conference, which was held in July of 2023. And I also had the opportunity to speak there. And I've talked about this on the podcast last year as well, and I'll make sure to include links to those episodes in the show notes. Today I have joining us Cathy McPhillips, who is the chief growth officer at the Marketing AI Institute. That's the organization that puts on Maken the marketing AI conference. And she has a background as the Content Marketing Institute helping to put on content marketing World, which is a huge conference. And she also has, uh, have a background in advertising with different agencies in Cleveland, Ohio, where she lives. Cathy, welcome to the podcast.

Cathy McPhillips:
Hi, Carol. I'm so excited this date finally has arrived. Yes.

Carol Cox:
Well, I was really excited. It was about a year ago last February when I got an email saying that I had been selected to speak at Macon. I had submitted my my speaker submission, just like so many of us do, and I know so many of you listeners do. And so it's always nice to be picked. We we always like it feels good and especially it feels good to be able to speak at a conference that I was excited to attend. Obviously, you know, I has basically exploded onto the world in the past 15 months. And you all at the Marketing AI Institute, I know I've been working on marketing an AI for years, so this was like your opportunity to to shine and to attract so many people to the work that you all do. So, Kathy, can you fill us in a little bit more on your background and what brought you to the marketing AI Institute?

Cathy McPhillips:
Certainly. Well, like you said, I started at two agencies in Cleveland, Ohio. Um, one, I was working in the studio and in production, and the other, I worked in media planning, which is what I wanted to do. My first agency, I just I needed a job, and there was an opening there, and I was like, okay, I'll do it. But it turns out that I loved it. It was such a great experience because it helped me learn about every aspect of the agency. So when I switched into media, which is what I wanted to do, I just really appreciated what the other departments did. So it was a nice, nice, um, opportunity to kind of learn more about an agency. And then I did my own thing for about ten years, and then I started working with Joe Pulizzi in the Content Marketing Institute. And through Joe, I met Paul Roetzer, who's the CEO of the Marketing AI Institute. And it's been about three years. It'll be three years in May that I've been that I've been with Paul and the team. So it's been it's been great. It's been exciting and fun and kind of what are we what are we doing? Um, and just so exciting. So I'm really excited. This will be my fourth Macon with the team. And then our fifth one overall.

Carol Cox:
Oh wow. Okay. And so then you have obviously a lot do a lot online. You know you have the podcast. You have different courses that you offer through through the through your website. And I'll make sure to include a link to the website in the show notes as well. So why did you all decide to do an in-person conference? And had you done this before the start of the pandemic, or was the first one kind of at the kind of as we were coming out of the pandemic?

Cathy McPhillips:
So like I said, this will be the fifth one. The first one was in 2019. So it was the summer before 2020, and in 2020, obviously the event got cancelled. I had not been I was not working with the company in 2019 for the live event. I came as a paid attendee. I came with, um, with Joe Pulizzi actually, and he and I went there and were like, okay, this is you know, obviously we're friends of Paul. We like Paul. We want to see what he's talking about, and we really want to support him. And I left like, oh my gosh, there are so many applications and things I'm working on. But then I went back to work and it was like things just kind of got busy and it just wasn't so tangible yet. And then 2020 didn't happen. 2021 was virtual, which was great to get back together, but it still wasn't the same. Even 2022 wasn't quite the same then. 2023. Oh my gosh. It was just it was just the absolute best. And like you said, you don't realize how much you miss seeing people. And like, I don't know if you know Tim Hayden, but he got to MAICON 2023 and he walked in and I was almost like, I think I'm going to start crying right now. It was just so nice to see our friends and see people together. So this will be our fifth one this summer or this fall. We're going to September this year.

Carol Cox:
Yeah. That's exciting. And it's in Cleveland, Ohio, which I know is where you live and I know and Paul and Mike and a bunch of you all live there. All right. So let's talk about then, you know Macon marketing I so obviously those are that's the main kind of gist of it is around marketing and I applications in marketing. So how do you all select speakers for Macon. What are you looking for? I know you have your main stage speakers as well as the breakout session speakers, so we can talk about both of those different buckets.

Cathy McPhillips:
Sure. From the main stage, that really is very highly curated by Paul. It's people that he's meeting through some conversations. It's people that he's following online. He's got a very, very highly curated list of folks he follows every week to get his eye news for the podcast. And if a new name pops up or even an old name pops up, he's like, oh my gosh, they've got a really great story to tell. I would love to have them at the event. So Paul and Tracy really do most of the programming for Macon. I like to interject some ideas when I can, or if I talk to someone, I'm like, this would be a great speaker. So I do collaborate a little bit with them, but those two really focus on most of the programming when it comes to breakouts. I feel like that's the biggest opportunity for so many of us from a, you know, director level, practitioner level, whatever the case may be, where we have we have stories to tell. You know, I'm on our team. Mike and I probably are the two using I the most on a lot of the things that we're doing. So me being able to say here was my problem. Here's a tool that I found to help me. Here was my process, here is my outcome. Like, that's a really powerful story to tell.

Cathy McPhillips:
And so I like to think like, if I was an attendee in the room, what would I want to get out of this? Like I want to give them something tangible, something meaty, something like a real good case study so they can either go back and do it themselves, go back and get buy in from their management, just giving them something really useful. And I think that's what we're looking for the most when it comes to breakout sessions is especially since last November 30th when ChatGPT came out, it was like, or I guess that was 2022. But since that happened more, there are so many more stories now that people have, from generative AI up to AI and data, AI and analytics, AI and so many other things, that there are just so many good stories now. And that's really what attendees, you know, the main stage is wonderful, obviously, but it's the breakouts that get a lot of folks that give them. The reason, you know, their managers wanted to say, what are you going to get from this event? You know, that's great to go see people in a network, but I want you to bring back something tangible. And the breakout sessions are that are those tangible sessions that most people attendees need to prove that the event was worth worth their investment.

Carol Cox:
So and then when you're looking at the speaker submissions, what stands out to you as far as like, yes, this this speaker looks like definitely in the we're going to look at them further, you know, to make it to make a decision versus some submissions that come through and is clearly no, it's not a good fit.

Cathy McPhillips:
I think one just taking a little bit of time on it and don't just, you know, make just don't breeze through it. Like really invest time. Look at the event. Look to see if there's a theme. Look to see who their audience is. Really, really read the speaker submission guidelines to make sure that you're adhering to everything that they're asking for. Uh, and customizing it to the event. You know, you might have the same presentation you're doing many times, which is which is great. We do that too, but we make sure that everything that we're doing is really customized to the audience and that we truly can show that we understand the people in the room and what we're and what message they need to hear from us. So it's important to really customize your abstract. I think it's also really important when they say to include a video that you really do. And if you're someone that doesn't have video, you know, I've been on stage dozens of times and I don't know if I have access to any of the recordings, but so either call the event that you spoke at and said, you know, can you send me a few minute clip of my session or they may send you the whole thing and they might just say, just don't publish it anywhere, but you can share it with somebody or. Get your phone out and just record yourself, you know, just have a conversation. They just want to see you. They want to see your emotion. They want to see your personality.

Cathy McPhillips:
They want to see if you can talk. You know how you're how you're talking. So that's really helpful to make sure that you include something like that, even if it's very, very rough. You know, they know that what you and your kitchen with your phone is not the same as you on a stage. They just want to see you. They want to see, uh, how you shine. So I think that's really important. I think, you know, being able to show that you are an expert in whatever it is that you're talking about, and I like to and I'm giving advice that I have been told before, you know, I always say, like, I don't know if I really have a story to share. Everyone else is doing the same things I'm doing. And what difference does my is my presentation versus somebody else's. And I like to say that, you know, no one has the unique experience that you do. So if you are going into a room and you are talking about a specific use case, a specific example of you doing something, no one else has that experience. So you might think, oh, it's so simple, but there might be someone in the room who will who can leave. They're just so inspired and so educated based on the information that you told them. And I think that's really powerful. So don't shortchange ourselves on our expertise and our knowledge, because people don't have that same knowledge that we have for our product, for our service, for the marketing that we're doing.

Carol Cox:
Yes, I completely agree, Cathy. Thank you for sharing that. And back to your point about customizing the speaker submission for that particular conference. And that's one thing that we we work with our clients on. And we and we tell podcast listeners all the time, like you said, like go to the website, see who the audience is for that particular event and what the organization is saying about the speaker submissions. Because I know, for example, for Macon use very specifically said say that the event largely caters to non-technical audiences. So, in other words, if you're going to be doing a submission, it's probably not going to be on. Kind of like the nuts and bolts of how to how to use an LM API to build your next application. Like that's a great topic for other conferences, but probably not the one that's in line with your audience's, which you tend to be, you know, marketers, people actually using tools like ChatGPT. They're not the ones building applications on top of ChatGPT.

Cathy McPhillips:
Yeah, but it might be someone who is a CMO at an organization who was looking at, okay, we're in a regulated industry and we are trying to build our own LM because of our our privacy restrictions and things like that. So or any company could do that doesn't need to be healthcare or anything regulated, but we just want to protect our own data. And here's how we did that. So maybe that is a really good story to tell. You know, if marketers and business leaders can understand it. And I think that's the difference, I think was what your point was, is our audience is marketers and business leaders, not data scientists. So if you have a story that a marketer or business leader really could understand, then yes, please, please apply, you know, and ask questions, you know, maybe send in a few different submissions. So you're because maybe there maybe one isn't. Just because sometimes if someone says no, this isn't a good fit for us, that doesn't mean that you aren't a good fit. It means that maybe that's that is already filled in the agenda. But if you send in a few things, maybe they can say, oh, this actually would fit. This person would be great, but we need them over here instead.

Carol Cox:
And when you're thinking about the speaker submissions like you mentioned, about case studies and use cases and what that that particular speaker is doing at their company or at their organization, are you looking for certain sizes of of organizations or companies that people work for? Is it are you looking for a mix people who are, you know, companies that are actually building things themselves, or more speakers at companies who are using the tools?

Cathy McPhillips:
I would say we lean more toward people that are using the tools less on agencies and less on tech companies. Um, but again, if there are stories to share, if a tech company, if a marketer at a tech company has a story to share about their using their technology or another technology, we're not going to exclude someone just because of the company they work for. It just really just depends on what message they have to share. And agencies, um, unfortunately, there are just always some bad eggs at any event where they get on stage and they just promote, promote, promote. And that just kind of makes us a little bit guarded on bringing in other companies and, you know, similar, you know, like I said, tech companies or agencies. But gosh, if there's an agency with a great story to tell, especially if they bring a client with them, that's wonderful.

Carol Cox:
So then okay, so imagine that we have our speaker submissions right. We do a great job on that. You know it's targeted towards that particular conference and it appeals and we get selected. So now what have you found has been helpful for you all on your end as the event organizers, as you're getting closer to the actual conference date, as far as things that are helpful for speakers to be doing for you all.

Cathy McPhillips:
Oh, it's always really nice when speakers just share that they're speaking at the event. You know, they have a network that, you know, we might have some overlap and who you're following and or you know, who's following you and who is following us. But it's always great to have someone say, oh my gosh, I didn't even know that event existed. Thank you, Carol, for telling me about it. You know, so that's always a wonderful thing. Um, you know, learning more about the audience, jumping into the app when the app is live to engage with attendees. And I think from an attendee standpoint, it's always great when there are speakers who hang out for 15 minutes after their session is over, just to take those questions to stay at the event for a little while, to meet attendees, to even come in a little bit early, to meet with attendees before your session, because there might be a little story you pick up in a conversation the night before that, you're like, oh my gosh, I'm going to weave this into my session. So really engaging with the audience and not just popping in, doing your session and hitting the road. It really is nice to have have people stick around.

Carol Cox:
I agree, if I'm speaking somewhere, I like to be there for the entire event because I like to get kind of the vibe of, you know, what are the other speakers? What have they been talking about? How has the audience been resonating with certain topics or certain things that have been brought up? So I remember my session that I did last year was about brand voice and maintaining brand voice, using AI tools like ChatGPT and how to do that. And at the beginning I had these really fun paddles that had either human or robot. And so it had the audience, you know, lift the paddle. Who do you think is going to be, you know, running the show either five, ten, 15, 20 years from now? And what I said and this was this was not planned, totally impromptu at the very beginning was, okay, based on everything you've been hearing at the conference so far, all these sessions, you know, whether it's about the future or about IP or, you know, all these different things, what, you know, how would you answer? So, because I had been there for the past day and a half now, I was able to talk to the audience about that and to your point about staying afterwards. So I think I was on the second day. So then the the morning of the third day, as you know, we were having the morning sessions and wrapping up before everyone left. At lunch, I was standing in line to get food, and I had a couple people kind of find me and say, Kara, I really enjoyed your session yesterday, you know, thank you so much. Can I follow up with you? And if I hadn't stuck around, I never would have had a chance to meet some of those people who had been in the audience who, you know, you can't meet 100 people after your session, but they'll find you during other times of the conference.

Cathy McPhillips:
Absolutely. It's such a nice, such a nice community. It's such a nice group of people and you never know, you might get a speaking opportunity out of sticking around, right?

Carol Cox:
Yes, exactly. All right. So then let's talk about actual, you know, the speakers presenting their talks. What makes a great speaker at your events, what have you found, based on the feedback that you get from attendees that they really like about about speakers that they've been sitting in their sessions?

Cathy McPhillips:
I guess I just think part of that is like one, they know who's in the room that they really can. They're really speaking the language of the people at the event in the room who are trying to learn from them to being engaging, you know, making eye contact, doing all this, the right things as a speaker, speaking slow, not reading off your slides, making it engaging, having a starting point and having like, here's the outcomes and here's here's what I did. Here are the steps I took. Here are the outcomes I think having something that they can just say, okay, taking the whole 45 minute session or however long the session is and saying, okay, here's what you need to take away from this. I think that's just really helpful to have just a flow to really to especially to the breakout sessions. And I like. And I love when there's engagement. You know, if there's a poll that goes up or if there's you're taking questions in the middle of your session and it's really up to the speaker, you know, whatever is easiest for you. But I love the engaging ones. Those those always seem to resonate a lot.

Carol Cox:
And then, Cathy, since you do quite a bit of speaking yourself, what are what are some things that you have done during your speaking engagements that you have found have worked really well?

Cathy McPhillips:
Well, I always start with a pretty a pretty good story. You know, I just did a presentation a few months ago at an alumni event for a many Ohio University universities in Ohio, all of their alumni directors. And I started with a story about me and a, um, a story about me with an alum and how this alum helped me get through college. And it was like it just kind of set the stage, you know, it kind of set the stage as me, as a human. I'm coming here to tell you a story about why I'm here and what what this impact of this person's role, who I was speaking to all these alumni directors, how that person at my university changed my life and how important it is, what they were doing. So just kind of was like just a real good that sounds, you know, a little bit cheesy. My daughter's like, that's really cheesy. I'm like, it is cheesy, but it's it's genuine, you know? And it just made me feel it made them feel like, okay, she values what we're doing. She's trying to, you know, relate to us and and I and then I often say sometimes like, I, I can talk to you about what I know. I am not trying to pretend to be an alumni director at a university. I'm just trying to tell you me as me. Here's some of my experiences. Maybe you can find a nugget or two for you to take home and and work on this yourself. Do you use some AI tools in your own work.

Carol Cox:
And anything else from from your speaking engagements? Do you do you kind of tend to use the same couple different presentations and then how much how how do you decide to customize them based for that particular event?

Cathy McPhillips:
Well, with AI, I feel like every time I do a presentation, I'm changing a handful of slides because things are moving so quickly. I actually just one of the biggest things I talk about is our podcast production. And I went through and I was doing a presentation yesterday and I was like, oh my gosh, all. We just rebranded our podcast. So I had to go through and change all of my like half of my slides because I had the old logo on it, which was easy. Um, but I always make sure, like, like I said, I know who the audience is, I customize it, I update it based on any new technology that I'm using. Uh, I'm trying to think what else I change, but I never use the same one twice. It's always changed in some in some way. You know, even the one with the alumni directors. I was using some tools I don't normally talk about because I wanted to apply it to, to their role. But the biggest story I have is our podcast, and that's what I know the best. So I want to make sure to include that. And I always start and say, you may not have a podcast, but a lot of the things I'm talking about, just think of my podcast, think of your biggest piece of content and how can you relate that to these steps and these tools that I'm using for your own work?

Carol Cox:
Well, since I have you here, let's talk about what you're doing with the podcast, because I want to talk about some of the AI tools that you have found to be really useful, since obviously you are you are the marketing AI Institute. And so tell me a little bit about, you know, how has your podcast process changed, you know, in the past year and what are you finding really helpful now as far as tools?

Cathy McPhillips:
Well, gosh, when I first started working on the podcast, I asked Paul, I said, who produces the podcast? And we were using someone at the time to do it for us. But then at that time it was. And the reason we we liked that person was because they just handled it. Except then when we got to the point where we were doing a news format, we didn't have 48 hours for the podcast to have someone else produce the podcast. So Paul's like, can you do it? And I was like, I don't know, I can try. So we started using these AI tools and we and we're doing it. It's been great. So we're using descript to edit our videos, edit our audio, create short form videos from that for YouTube shorts, Instagram Stories and TikTok, which has been the best thing in the world. There's a there's so many AI tools in there within, descript from editing through cutting the transcription to adjusting your the sound through studio sound to overdubbing overdubbing voices. And we've had to fix a few things with AI, Paul, AI, Mike and I, Kathy on some of on some things which has been remarkable. And there are some other things we've been using in there. And then we also use Writer or Jasper to help us with some of our blog posts. We use ChatGPT, perplexity, anthropic for Agora, Pulse. For some of our social uh, we use Opus clip for some short form videos because it makes it the, you know, the portrait versus horizontal. So we can use that on, like I said, YouTube shorts and things like that. And I know I'm missing some Grammarly to help us with our blog post, Canva to help us with some of our images. So there's AI all in every single step of our process.

Carol Cox:
That's a lot of tools. I mean, it's it's good, but it's a lot of a lot of different things. I'm sure you were excited about the potentiality of AI agents to basically like take the workflow and go through, and then the AI agents just do all of those different steps at some point.

Cathy McPhillips:
But it is amazing that AI estimated. So we we save about 15 hours a week by using the tools that we're using. So that's 60 hours a month, and we're spending less than $100 a month on the tools collectively.

Carol Cox:
Wow. That's amazing. 15 hours a week. That's a that's significant. Is that mostly like where where do you find this? Those savings are coming from.

Cathy McPhillips:
I think mostly in the transcription. We want to we want to have captions on things just to be accessible. And it is good for SEO on our blog post, on our show notes blog post, and then in the blog post. Writing my blog posts take a lot of a long time to write. So if we can take Mike and Paul's content from the podcast transcript and put it into some of these tools that help us write the blog posts, I feel like that's a really good use of helping using AI to help you write posts, because we are taking their words and having it put into. It's not like we're asking it to generate a post for us. We're taking their words and having it repurpose for us. So I think that's a little bit different. So you know everything we're doing, Mike goes in and gives everything a hard edit because sometimes it's not right. Sometimes it's not the flow that he was looking for. Uh, but it really those are probably the two biggest areas. And the things like the sound, you know, I don't know, before studio sound, before that feature was enabled, we weren't using it and it sounded fine. But then you realize when you use that feature, you're like, oh my gosh, it sounds so much better. So there are some things we didn't even know that we needed until until we found them.

Carol Cox:
Cathy, what are you most excited about regarding AI? Unless let's talk about maybe this year or 2024. Like what? And then I'm most excited about let's even look like, say, 3 to 5 years out. Like, what would your vision be for what I could do for us?

Cathy McPhillips:
I think the thing that we talk about that we're excited about the most is just the chance to get a little bit of our time back and not always having to replace that time with more work, but maybe being able to to step away a little bit more clear our heads, more refresh energized, we can get back to doing what we're doing the next day. But I think there's going to be a lot of opportunities. You know, Paul talks a lot about generative AI being great, but there are so many other ways I could help us, especially in the data and analytics space. You know, I have to admit, as much as I love data, I am not an expert at it. And just to have some of these tools help me synthesize some of this data, pull it into a format that's so I can analyze it better and be smarter using our data database better, um, things like that, that like, how can we better reach our customers through the use of AI, which sounds counterintuitive, but that actually can help us be more personalized, be more human if the AI can, if the AI can help us in some of those areas.

Carol Cox:
Yeah. One thing that I did is I downloaded all of the my podcast stats from. Lipson into a CSV file, and I uploaded it into GPT and had it analyze it. So basically look at, you know, based on the number of downloads and you know, how in like the first 30 days of downloads with different criteria, which topics tend to get the most listens? You know, because I have 370 plus episodes, actually, this month is the seven year anniversary of the podcast, so there's a lot of content. Now, of course, I kind of know intuitively which topics get the most feedback or or the most listeners, but I want it, you know, it to like, look at the hard data and tell me. And it was actually surprising some of the things that I found and what I, what was interesting was that some of it is topic based, but a lot of it happened to be on that. I knew it was the guest that drove a lot of the downloads. The topic was secondary, but I'm like, oh, but I need to find more guests like that or have that guest back on, because obviously that drove a lot of listens.

Cathy McPhillips:
That's really interesting. I mean, it's like like you said, you know, intuitively some of those things, but then you're like, oh, that's actually surprised me or something will surface that you don't even realize. Like, there's we have so much data nowadays, like, let's use these tools to help us, because I remember the days when I was, you know, early in my career when it was like, we just need more data. And now it's like, we don't need any more data. We just need to be able to dissect it better and understand it better.

Carol Cox:
Exactly. All right. So Kathy, let us know what is going on with the marketing AI Institute. What are some different ways that listeners can learn more and to get involved with what you're doing?

Cathy McPhillips:
Oh my gosh, there's so much going on. It's been a it's been a crazy start to the year. Uh, so we relaunched our 2024 AI Academy for marketers classes. We've got a great intro class which is free. Paul and I do that every few weeks. You can find that on our website. And then within Academy we have piloting AI, which is an eight hour course on, uh, just how to get started with AI, how to pilot your first program, how to figure out where to start. Scaling AI would be the next step for directors and above, or anybody. Anybody could take it for sure about building an AI council, building generative AI policies, building an AI roadmap, being that change agent within your organization, the governance and things like that, that really you spent, you know, you're working on piloting and now like, okay, let's see this come to fruition. Let's see this through. How do you do that. And then our AI mastery membership. So the scaling AI is also a prerecorded. And they both just recorded it within the past few weeks. And then the AI mastery membership I'm super excited about.

Cathy McPhillips:
It's once a month access live access to our team, mostly Paul and then Mike and then a little bit of me and on our other team members where there's an ask me anything once a month or once a quarter, there is a trends briefing once a quarter. And then there is some demos and it's just our team demoing tech, no sales pitches. The tech companies may not even know we're doing it. We're just going to go through and say, here was a use case that we had. Here's a tool we use. We want to show you how we used it within this platform and doing some live demos. So I'm really excited about that. Macon, coming up, we've got a bunch of virtual summits. We just had our AI writer summit in early March. Our AI for B2B summit is in June, and then our AI for agencies is TBD. So we're just trying you know, we've our mission is really just to make AI approachable and accessible to marketers and business leaders and AI literacy. So we just keep doing these new things. So it's been fun.

Carol Cox:
Yes, lots of events and I and I'm and I'm always, uh, very, uh, have a lot of admiration for people who put on a lot of events because it is not my thing. I'm, I'm very detailed and organized, but I don't know if event production and planning is a whole different thing.

Cathy McPhillips:
It's. Yeah, it's it's a lot, but it's so much fun. It's so much fun to seeing attendees and seeing them. Like when you just see that something spark in them.

Carol Cox:
It is.

Carol Cox:
Well, Cathy, thank you so much for coming on the Speaking Your Brand podcast, and I really appreciate everything that you all do at the Marketing AI Institute. I've learned a lot by listening to you all over the past year plus, and I will continue to do so. And for those of you listening, make sure to connect with Cathy on LinkedIn. I'll include a link to her profile in the show notes, as well as to the Marketing AI Institute website and to their fantastic podcast. Thank you, uh, Kathy, so much for joining us.

Cathy McPhillips:
And thank you. And one last thing, if you don't mind me saying so. So our MAICON call for speakers did close for this year. But events are always looking for good people to speak. We have our virtual events, we've got our blog, we've got all these different things. So please. And we may have someone drop out of the event as we get closer. You know, you just never know what might happen. So always apply to speak. And if you didn't get included last year, then try again this year because it may not have been for any other reason than that they were full. So keep trying.

Carol Cox:
Yes, yes, keep trying because you never know. Just that they already had someone for that topic or they were full or just for some reason your submission just got overlooked. It doesn't mean necessarily that you were not a great speaker or your topic is not great. Just keep keep applying because there are conferences and events out there who need great speakers. And I know for those of you listening that that's who you are.

Carol Cox:
Thanks again to Cathy for coming on the podcast. If you would like to find out what speaker archetype you are so you can amplify your natural communication strengths and add to them to make you even more dynamic speaker, you can take our free quiz at speakingyourbrand.com/quiz. It only takes a few minutes. It's ten multiple choice questions and then you get your results right away. Again, you can take that as speaking in your brand. Com slash quiz. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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