New online networking site for speakers gives planners more options

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. And while tough times can bring out creative ideas both in business and meeting planning, it’s also a prime opportunity to follow the fundamentals of economics in action. Case in point: as the demand for hotel blocks and meeting space has gone down, so too have their rates. And it’s not just room rates that have sagged of late, but nearly everything connected to meetings as well, including speaker’s fees—earlier this year, Nationwide Speakers Bureau was offering 20–50 percent discounts off quoted prices.

So the last thing you might expect in this climate is for someone to start a new speaker service. But that’s exactly what Artie Isaac and his partner Rob Emrich did in November 2008, with the launching of SpeakerSite.com. As speakers themselves, they understood the meetings and events industry, as well as the needs of speakers. More than that, they were also well familiar with Web 2.0, which is how they designed their site, a sort of LinkedIn/Facebook mashup for speakers and event planners.

“Rob came to me with the idea and said it’s strange there’s no social network for public speakers,” says Isaac, who’s a speaker on several topics and an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University. “It was just this recognition that there seemed to be a gap in the marketplace. It seems like an industry that has not been taking advantage of Web 2.0 technology.”

Without that network—and thus little contact with his fellow speakers—Isaac was unsure how speakers might react to such a site. “Perhaps they’re lone eagles and don’t want to share best practices,” he says. But after six months in operation, the site has more than 3,000 members who not only share their best practices, but also refer other speakers to the planners they’ve worked with in the past.

While you won’t find Richard Branson, Lance Armstrong or other high-profile—and high-priced—speakers on SpeakerSite, you will find plenty of mid-level speakers at a variety of price and experience levels. Like most social networking sites, speakers sign up by adding a profile that includes the topics they speak on and the fee range they charge—from free to $10,000 and up—with most falling somewhere in between. “A large number have real-life experience at professional speaking, and others who are putting their toe in the water for the first time,” Isaac says.

Planners can do a search by criteria to find an appropriate match, or can post an open call with information about their event for speakers to contact them with a proposal. “We have all topics, and speakers in all continents, and it’s a broad diversity, every topic under the sun,” he says. speakersite.com