Ken

“Keeping Speaker Bios From Going Stale

Last week I found four public versions of my speaker bio in the wild, including one that still says I’m “currently researching” a project I finished two years ago.

That sent me into a little speaker-audit spiral. I found an old conference page using a bio from 2021, a webinar replay with my 2019 headshot, and two different slide deck links for what is supposedly the same accessibility talk. A couple of organizers had clearly copied text from previous event listings, which I completely understand, but now there are stale descriptions multiplying like gremlins.

My current system is… generous to call it a system. I have a Google Doc with long and short bios, a folder of headshots, separate abstracts for 30/45/60-minute versions of the same talk, and then a bunch of ad hoc emails to organizers. Somewhere in there are slide links, workshop notes, and the occasional random reference link like https://playplinkogames.com/ that reminds me why I should not rely on search history as a knowledge base.

I’m rebuilding my speaker portfolio before spring conference season and I’m considering one public speaker page with my current bio, approved headshots, talk menu, slide archive, and maybe a private organizer kit link for each accepted event.

For those of you who speak regularly: do you try to get old event pages corrected, or do you let them stand as historical records? How do you label updated versions of talks versus past versions? And how do you gently stop organizers from copying obsolete promo text?

Complication: some of my paid workshops include private handouts or client-specific examples, so I can’t make everything public.

I’d love to see real workflows, especially from people who repeat and adapt the same core talk over several years.”