Do you want to know a sure fire way to alienate large portions of your audience?

“You all know the next speaker…”

Can I let you in on a little secret? Not everyone knows the person that you are neglecting to introduce, so you always need to properly introduce someone. This common oversight only gets worse when the person comes up and gets right into the content without introducing themselves after a misguided introduction.

When someone introduces a speaker as “a person that needs no introduction”, you will alienate everyone in the audience that doesn’t know the speaker from Adam. It also has the unintended effect of that are unfamiliar with the speaker feel like they are not connected with the rest of the group, which makes the speakers job far more difficult.

As a speaker, you need to make sure you have written an introduction and provided it to the person that will be introducing you. I wrote a post on this last year that you should check out.

Even when writing and providing an introduction, sometimes people will introduce you as the speaker everyone knows. When this happens, and it happens a lot, you as a speaker need to know how to recover from this major speaking faux pas. Whether it is in a Toastmasters club, association meeting, or other event; you have to assume that there is a large part of the audience that doesn’t know who you are or what you can do.

If you are being introduced as someone that everyone knows already, then you have a moral obligation to introduce yourself to the audience. If you have a powerful opening  that draws people into your content, consider developing an alternate introduction that draws people in while establishing who you are and why that matters.

To do this, you need to develop the same parts that you would have written and given to the person that introduced you. That means you have to provide your expertise on the topic, a statement that gets people’s attention, and compelling reasons for the audience to listen to what you have to say. This allows you to quickly let people know who you are, why you are there, and what you hope to accomplish. When you have soothed people into the speech, you can then get into the meat of the content.

Another gesture you can make to people who do not know you is to acknowledge them while speaking. This allows you to establish the connection with them to make them feel like they are a part of the group that knows you. Doing this makes the speech stronger, and establishes that you care about the audience.

As speakers and introducers, you must continue to be vigilant in stomping out this habit. Continuing to not introduce speakers can kill the credibility of the speakers and make it so people don’t want to join the group.

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