Live is life! 🎤 🎸
Engagement is the name of the game
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou
What A Keynote Concert Is
In an oyster shell, it’s a keynote presentation in the treble clef 🎼
🦪 Educating
🦪 Entertaining
🦪 Empowering
But unlike those snooze-inducing PowerPoint keynote presentations, a keynote concert is, above all, engaging.
Conferences are shifting from just dishing out bland, pre-written content to a passive audience, to providing engaging experiences that hold an audience captive.
Engagement has always been the name of the long game for content marketers.
But…
Authenticity, as in “Been there, done that”, was a challenge they faced. So they hired niche specialists, like me (Thank you, Africa HR!), to write engaging content for them.
Until…
Generative AI—the big equalizer—came crawling in, in wave after wave.🕷️
Content marketers celebrated the end of their dependency on content writers. 🥂
The partying was short-lived, though. In the aftermath of their hangover, they found themselves at sea: The generative AI sea-of-sameness.
A sea that did not make waves! 🌊
But nothing beats human resilience—they soon found a chink in AI’s armor—the arachnid 🕷️ has a heartless heart! 🤫
Empathy, as in “I feel you, bro”, became the game-changer for standout content, which, thanks to AI, is the endgame now…
Because AI can’t feel a damn thing!
But what’s a keynote concert got to do with this?
Well, besides an engagement ring, 💍 few things are as engaging as an interactive keynote eXperience dressed up in the garb of a live concert—performed by flesh-and-blood humans.
Nothing—not books, not audio; not even video—beats the “I was there!” experience of a live keynote concert.
What’s unique about the Unplugged! Keynote Concerts?
Unlike conventional keynote concerts, which combine live music with motivational speaking on general topics, my Unplugged keynote concerts are based on specific topics from my own books.
Concert Format
🧠 Left-Brain Matter: I speak on a topic for one Pomodoro (25 minutes)—that’s the maximum time a captive audience can maintain focused attention.
🎶 Right Brain matters: The audience takes a five-minute break after each Pomodoro during which, I ask for the house lights to be doused while I perform a hit cover song of the ’80s that’s relevant to the topic, to take them from captive to enthralled.
This combination makes the topic “sticky” 🍯—the attendees remember the topic and the venue whenever they hear that particular song, for years to come.
For example, after a discussion about CCTV cameras in the workplace, an acoustic rendition of “Every Breath You Take (I’ll Be Watching You)” would plaster the message like a tattoo on to their brain.
Hopefully, whenever and wherever a participant hears that song, they’ll not only remember the keynote speech, but me as well 😘—instead of Sting! 🐝