When the Presentation "Platform" is a Stage: Speaking Your Message

Kenny, Cofounder and CEO of ThreeSixtyEight, presented Assembly Required: Why Your Small Business Should Have An Event Strategy at the Hubspot Inbound 2018 marketing conference on September 5 in Boston. In this interview, he talks about hosting events as an outstanding way to create positive customer experiences—to pick up new clients, grow accounts, retain talent, and position your team members as leaders. Kenny also discusses the power of eye-to-eye contact and the distancing effect of the "theater effect," when the speaker is elevated on a stage. Kenny's agency focuses on user experience and strategy. His Big Fish Presentations service line helps presenters and brands better present and communicate their messages. His user experience/human experience/customer experience philosophy applies not only to the website interface, but also to face to face interactions. He groups these as: the networking/customer appreciation event, the salon, featuring small workshops or a series of speakers, and the conference. Kenny feels that the most effective agencies are those that teach their clients. Strategy is more holistic than tactics—it is the "why" behind the tactics (e.g., I need a new website [tactic] because [the why] I need to improve my sales.)—where the "Why" may even, upon deeper investigation, reveal that a "different" tactic (e.g., improved social media conversion) may better produce the desired results. Kenny emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions up front in order to discover the whether the identified problem is merely a symptom of a larger problem. Kenny can be contacted on LinkedIn at Kenny Nguyen, by email at [email protected], or through the company's websites, threesixtyeight.com or assemblyrequiredla.com.