Why do speakers need introductions?  They’re often badly done – a hapless VP of Something has a piece of paper thrust in his hands, and he stumbles through a poorly written bio of the speaker that leaves everyone baffled about who she is or why she is talking to them.  Often, it’s a dry recitation of the resume of the speaker, covering items that are no longer of interest even to the subject of the dreary listing. 

But well done, introductions serve an essential purpose for the speaker and the audience and they greatly increase the likelihood that the former will succeed and the latter will be interested in the former succeeding.

What is this rough magic that introductions perform?  A good introduction saves the speaker an enormous amount of work.  Audiences want two things from their speakers: credibility and trust.  The introduction can take care of the credibility issue before the speaker has to open her mouth. That just leaves trust, and the speaker has 60 minutes to work on that. 

A good introduction provides an instant third-party endorsement of the speaker.  Your introduction should answer three questions: 

1.  Who are you (what are your qualifications to speak)?
2.  What are you talking about (what’s the subject, in terms the audience can understand)?
3.  Why should this audience care (how are you relevant to that audience’s needs, desires, wants or fears)? 

In short, a good introduction elevates the speaker in terms of the audience so that the speaker doesn’t have to do that work. 

A good introducer is someone the audience knows, who has some prestige within the group.  If the introducer needs an introduction, someone has screwed up somewhere.  Yet I’ve seen many a conference where the VP of Something is introduced by the VOG (Voice of God) over the PA system so that he can stand up and introduce, say, Marcus Buckingham, whom the audience already knows perfectly well. 

If no one is available to introduce you, that makes it much harder for you to establish your credibility.  The best way is to briefly and humbly give a couple of relevant sentences of your bio to orient the audience, and to jump in to your talk.  Don’t go on too long, because it’s simply not charming to talk endlessly about yourself.  That’s not the job of a speaker. 

An alternative that is extraordinarily effective is to prepare a brief video introduction.  We’ve done this for some of our clients and it works extremely well.  A professionally produced video has all the bells and whistles the VP of Something lacks, and it’s amazing what a soundtrack and a good script can do to build up an audience’s expectations.  Here’s an example: http://tinyurl.com/ae8246.