Leveraging OPSC (other people’s social capital)

Okay, so you’ve read the couple emails on speaking at conferences, and you are cool with the fact that you’re never going to not be nervous, which is what I discussed last week.

In other words, you’re down with the benefits of speaking on conference panels.

But hang on. Before we get started, there’s one more thing you need to know, one more benefit you need to know about.

And that is that there is a huge amount of social capital in the room. Think of all the other people, and how many of them are friends with each other. Think of how they’ve trusted the conference organizer enough to plunk down a bunch of money to fly to another city, book a hotel room, and buy overpriced sandwiches.

There’s an awful lot of trust and social capital floating around.

That trust and that social capital, those were built up by somebody else. You don’t have to build them up from scratch all by yourself. You get to leverage an existing asset someone else built.

How do you leverage that asset to the max? You get up there on the stage and speak on one of the panels. Let some of that capital someone else built rub off on you, too.

Below is a video short where my client Ebru Demirel discusses how her conference appearances leverage OPSC in this way:

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