Monday, January 8, 2018

Tips for Success: Selecting a title for an optional talk

There are two types of presentation opportunities: mandatory and optional. This post is a discussion of the latter.

A quick scan of your local community news, a visit to a conference, the monthly meeting of your organization all tend to have something in common, optional talks. A busy reader scans the information making a decision on whether they might be interested in attending.

The headline, most important piece of information is the talk title. Consider these five titles taken from upcoming webcasts at SANS January 2018:

Improving Your Defenses - CredentialGuard in Windows 10
What Event Logs? Part 1: Attacker Tricks to Remove Event Logs
Head Hacking
How to Build & Maintain an Open Source SIEM
Are You in Control? Managing the CIS Critical Security Controls within your Enterprise

Assuming you are interested in the general topic of cybersecurity, are there any titles that cause you to reject further investigation of the talk by reading its title? Do any really reach out and grab you?

Different things appeal to individuals, here are off-the-cuff thoughts of two of them:
Head Hacking
= What's that? Probably social engineering. Do I care enough to click to read more?
How to Build & Maintain an Open Source SIEM
= Boring, but possibly useful. I would probably click to read more.

Now let's look at the two longest examples:
What Event Logs? Part 1: Attacker Tricks to Remove Event Logs
= Consider: Attacker Tricks to Remove Event Logs

Are You in Control? Managing the CIS Critical Security Controls within your Enterprise
= This one is hard. The word "control", used twice, has a different meaning in each use. This causes cognitive dissonance. Most people will probably ignore this talk because of its title.

Tips for titles:
- Keep it short, while explaining what the talk is about. 
- Feature the subject matter, if you have chosen a subject people want to hear about they will be interested.
- Avoid humor unless your presentation is about comedy. You are vying for time from busy people.
- Avoid abbreviations and acronyms unless you are certain your audience regularly uses them.





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