What's the Hold Up With All Those Speaker Proposals, Deb?

When I logged into my BlogWorld email account on Monday morning there were 211 emails waiting. About 40 of them were from people looking for the status of their speaker proposals. I also have folks contacting me or wondering aloud on Twitter – everyone wants to know if we accepted their proposals. Many are (falsely) assuming that since they heard nothing, they didn’t make the cut.

As I promised to be transparent about this whole thing and let you all know if there are any delays, problems or issues, I’m giving another update as to the status of the remaining speaker proposals.

As of today, August 5, 2010:

• Most who submitted speaker proposals haven’t been contacted. It has nothing to do with whether we like you or your proposal, it simply means we’re still trying to finalize the schedule.

• The speakers who already heard from us did so because we either didn’t feel as if their proposal was a good fit this year, or because we finalized the track that their proposal do fit into. For example, the Content, Health and Tools & Technology tracks are complete. The social media, digital media, sports, food, travel and a few other tracks aren’t quite complete because there are committees and track leaders going through all of those proposals looking for the best fit for their respective tracks. As soon as they finalize their recommendations and we approve their recommendations, we’ll send out notices to the remaining potential speakers.

Basically, if we still have your proposal we like you and we’re trying to find the best fit. As we don’t have enough space open, many of you may still receive notices telling you we don’t have room for your talk this year. However, I want to stress that for those people, we really did want you to speak. That we kept your proposal until the very end means that we were hesitant to let it go – and the only reason it didn’t make the cut is because there is simply no room for every speaker who submitted a proposal.

When will you hear from us?

I’m so reluctant to answer this question. I made it my personal goal to respond to every speaker proposal (either positive or negative) by July 15th. I obviously didn’t make that goal. Some of it is my fault, that I was simply overwhelmed, and some of it is because I’m waiting on the track leaders and committees to make their decisions.

I really, really, hope we’ll have any answer for everyone some time next week. However, if I tell you that and it doesn’t happen, I’ll look like an ass. I’m aware that it’s holding you up, and also, holding up anyone looking for a schedule before making a decision. We do have a list of Confirmed Speakers that we will be adding to again shortly. We’re also making periodic announcements on this blog, Twitter and our Facebook page regarding keynotes, panels and speakers. Hopefully this news is enough to help with a decision.

All speakers who sent in proposals that aren’t accepted will receive the early bird discount, with a savings of almost 50%. We hope that makes up for all the time and frustration.

I ask that you’re all patient just a little longer. We want to provide BlogWorld attendees with the best educational content possible. I hope you can understand why we don’t take that responsibility lightly.

Deb Ng is BlogWorld’s Conference Director. She also blogs about blogging and social media at Kommein. Feel free to follow her on Twitter @debng.