Member since May 2016
Bobbie Carlton is the founder of Carlton PR & Marketing, Innovation Nights and Innovation Women, or, as she calls them, the day job, the night job and the dream job. Carlton is an entertaining, tell-it-like-it-is speaker who speaks extensively (and passionately) about public speaking and how it can be the driving force behind career growth and business success. She's a TEDx speaker; an entertaining startup event host; she's spoken at the United Nations; she's shared the stage with storytelling legend (and NPR's Snap Judgment host) Glynn Washington; and she's been on the main stage for some of the world’s best-known conferences for technical and professional women. Carlton has been featured on CBS News, in the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, USA Today and other major media. Through Innovation Nights, Carlton has helped to launch more than 1500 new products for startups who raised more than $4B in funding. She was previously the head of global PR at two different enterprise software companies and the head of marketing for a brand devoted to providing positive role models for preteen girls. She’s inspired thousands of technical, entrepreneurial and professional women to take control of their own speaking careers and has worked with event managers around the world to deliver diverse and inclusive events.
Helping entrepreneurial, technical and professional women get more visibility that helps them super-charge their careers, connect with more customers and partners, get their businesses funded and be invited to boards and other top opportunities.
Helping conferences and events produce diverse, inclusive and gender-equitable events.
I have so many stories I can share after 30+ years in the high tech marketing and PR community. I can talk about Innovation Nights, our social media powered monthly product launch party and networking event. We've helped to launch more than 1500 new products for startups that raised more than $4B in collective funding. Innovation Women has helped hundreds of women get onstage to tell their stories and connect with potential customers, partners, investors, new jobs and more. And my years in PR have given me endless stories that often sound ripped from the headlines...because they are: The Extortionist; The Murderer; The Naked Holiday Party, and Quarantined on the Diamond Princess (not me, my clients). Yes, I managed PR for passengers on the Diamond Princess in February 2020 so I was probably involved when you first read about COVID.
Innovation Women is the third of my companies. The first two were founded when the startup I was working with ran out of money in November 2008 (a lot of startups had difficulties then). Innovation Nights and Carlton PR & Marketing were founded because there were no other jobs available at the time. Innovation Women came out of my personal frustration around the #allmale and #allpale panels at conferences and events, especially technical ones. I knew we could change things so I crowdfunded the money to fund the original web application and the rest is history.
What does it take to become seen as a thought leader? As the expert or the authority in your field? Often, nothing more than the willingness to stand up and share your ideas. Public speaking is the way.
But how do you get onstage? How can we create paths to the stage suitable for everyone? With this look behind the scenes at conferences and events, you’ll learn about the personal and professional benefits of public speaking, and what it can mean for you and your career.
Takeaways:
This presentation is frequently requested by corporate ERGs or groups comprised of professional women at all stages of their careers.
Mark Cuban called it the Milli Vanilli effect - there will soon be so much video AI that people won't know that what they see or hear is real UNLESS IT IS LIVE, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM. (And, even then, is the content being presented a product of the speaker, or AI-generated. Does it matter?) AI will lead to an explosion of interest in real world events. You need to step up your public speaking game.
Public speaking will be the last bastion of credible, believable thought leaders. Without the speaking skills, without a deep understanding of how to get yourself on stage, deliver actionable insights and market/sell without overt selling (no one wants to be sold to from the stage), you will be left behind.
This presentation will pull back the curtain on speaking to drive business, provide you with an action plan, AND leave you laughing.
Audience members will be able to:
Two-thirds of all conference speakers are men, leaving women out of many business opportunities. Public speaking engagements can help you be seen as a thought leader or expert. They can connect you with potential customers, employees or business partners. Public speakers are also more likely to be selected as board members or get funding.
This introduction to public speaking for business success is especially designed with female business owners and solopreneurs in mind. Even if public speaking is a source of fear and nervousness, you can use public speaking to help build your business, whether it's coaching, consulting, or selling products or services.
We'll walk you through how to think expansively about public speaking, how to decide what you would present on, and how to find and secure the right speaking opportunities for you. We'll also provide you with a structure for beginning to think about your signature talk or concept.
Takeaways:
Boring? Puzzling? Annoying? These are all hallmarks of presentations that just don’t work. Is your audience playing Candy Crush or scrolling TikTok while you speak? Are you nervous about your ability to engage an audience and communicate your points?
This presentation will help you give a great speech and demonstrate what makes a bad one. You'll learn:
I have given variations on this talk several times, including a tech-specific version at the Women in Tech Summit 2022 virtual event and the WITS Mid-Atlantic 2023 in-person event. It can also be offered as an interactive workshop.
90 percent of your presentation will be forgotten by next week.
As speakers, we need to work hard to help the audience remember what we said and show them how they can use the information we provide in their own lives.
Bobbie will show you how to prepare so that you can reach your goals as a speaker while still treating speaking as an act of service. Learn how to:
Capture their attention. Keep their attention. Be memorable.
When you think of THE leading expert on any topic, you are more likely to immediately think of an older white man. It's OK. It doesn't mean you are a bad person. It means you have been subjected to years of brainwashing - it's unconscious bias. You've seen the same faces and heard the same voices over and over again. Of course those must be the experts. If we insert more women into speaking engagements; if event managers do their part to gender-balance their events; if reporters call on more women as expert sources, we should eventually reach gender-parity in our perception of who leads, who should be funded, who should sit on boards and who should get new leadership opportunities.
The headline read "Men named Michael outnumber female CEOs presenting at #JPM18". RSA was raked over the coals for booking just one female keynote (out of 20), Monica Lewinsky, for their cyber security conference. CES was taken to task for not finding any female keynotes.
The social media stream dishes out punishment in the form of hashtags, #AllMalePanel #NoManels. Conference organizers need to be more aware than ever before of gender-balance, inclusion and diversity, or suffer the consequences.“Manel” is industry jargon for a panel of featured speakers at a conference or event consisting entirely of men.
Creating a “No Manel Zone” at your event means you commit to not fielding any manels (a panel or a group of three or more speakers, with or without a moderator, entirely of men.)
But diverse panels are only part of the equation – conferences also need to consider:
And while the dangers of failure are apparent, there are also rewards to be reaped, including larger ticket sales, better quality programming and more wide-spread impact. Join the founder of Innovation Women, a new model "visibility bureau" designed to connect event managers (for free) to awesome speakers, presenters and experts who all just happen to be women.
This talk is for event managers, conference organizers and event management. It can be delivered as a talk or a workshop. It was originally created and delivered to the content providers for the NAB Show, one of the largest professional conferences of broadcasters in the world.
Big marketing budgets don't always guarantee big results. Big companies spend a fortune on their product launches—millions and millions of dollars—and even they don’t have all the budget they’d like.
Over the last decade, Bobbie Carlton helped to launch more than a 1500 new products...for free, using a social media powered methodology, crowdpromoting, anyone can learn and use.
This presentation is usually a big winner at startup and marketing events. To learn more, watch my TEDx presentation.
As the founder of Innovation Women and the host of our weekly Speaker Friend Fridays, Bobbie's expertise is available to all Innovation Women members. But she does do some small amounts of private coaching.
Send QueryI have so many stories I can share after 30+ years in the high tech marketing and PR community. I can talk about Innovation Nights, our social media powered monthly product launch party and networking event. We've helped to launch more than 1500 new products for startups that raised more than $4B in collective funding. Innovation Women has helped hundreds of women get onstage to tell their stories and connect with potential customers, partners, investors, new jobs and more. And my years in PR have given me endless stories that often sound ripped from the headlines...because they are: The Extortionist; The Murderer; The Naked Holiday Party, and Quarantined on the Diamond Princess (not me, my clients). Yes, I managed PR for passengers on the Diamond Princess in February 2020 so I was probably involved when you first read about COVID.
Innovation Women is the third of my companies. The first two were founded when the startup I was working with ran out of money in November 2008 (a lot of startups had difficulties then). Innovation Nights and Carlton PR & Marketing were founded because there were no other jobs available at the time. Innovation Women came out of my personal frustration around the #allmale and #allpale panels at conferences and events, especially technical ones. I knew we could change things so I crowdfunded the money to fund the original web application and the rest is history.
What does it take to become seen as a thought leader? As the expert or the authority in your field? Often, nothing more than the willingness to stand up and share your ideas. Public speaking is the way.
But how do you get onstage? How can we create paths to the stage suitable for everyone? With this look behind the scenes at conferences and events, you’ll learn about the personal and professional benefits of public speaking, and what it can mean for you and your career.
Takeaways:
This presentation is frequently requested by corporate ERGs or groups comprised of professional women at all stages of their careers.
Mark Cuban called it the Milli Vanilli effect - there will soon be so much video AI that people won't know that what they see or hear is real UNLESS IT IS LIVE, RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM. (And, even then, is the content being presented a product of the speaker, or AI-generated. Does it matter?) AI will lead to an explosion of interest in real world events. You need to step up your public speaking game.
Public speaking will be the last bastion of credible, believable thought leaders. Without the speaking skills, without a deep understanding of how to get yourself on stage, deliver actionable insights and market/sell without overt selling (no one wants to be sold to from the stage), you will be left behind.
This presentation will pull back the curtain on speaking to drive business, provide you with an action plan, AND leave you laughing.
Audience members will be able to:
Two-thirds of all conference speakers are men, leaving women out of many business opportunities. Public speaking engagements can help you be seen as a thought leader or expert. They can connect you with potential customers, employees or business partners. Public speakers are also more likely to be selected as board members or get funding.
This introduction to public speaking for business success is especially designed with female business owners and solopreneurs in mind. Even if public speaking is a source of fear and nervousness, you can use public speaking to help build your business, whether it's coaching, consulting, or selling products or services.
We'll walk you through how to think expansively about public speaking, how to decide what you would present on, and how to find and secure the right speaking opportunities for you. We'll also provide you with a structure for beginning to think about your signature talk or concept.
Takeaways:
Boring? Puzzling? Annoying? These are all hallmarks of presentations that just don’t work. Is your audience playing Candy Crush or scrolling TikTok while you speak? Are you nervous about your ability to engage an audience and communicate your points?
This presentation will help you give a great speech and demonstrate what makes a bad one. You'll learn:
I have given variations on this talk several times, including a tech-specific version at the Women in Tech Summit 2022 virtual event and the WITS Mid-Atlantic 2023 in-person event. It can also be offered as an interactive workshop.
90 percent of your presentation will be forgotten by next week.
As speakers, we need to work hard to help the audience remember what we said and show them how they can use the information we provide in their own lives.
Bobbie will show you how to prepare so that you can reach your goals as a speaker while still treating speaking as an act of service. Learn how to:
Capture their attention. Keep their attention. Be memorable.
When you think of THE leading expert on any topic, you are more likely to immediately think of an older white man. It's OK. It doesn't mean you are a bad person. It means you have been subjected to years of brainwashing - it's unconscious bias. You've seen the same faces and heard the same voices over and over again. Of course those must be the experts. If we insert more women into speaking engagements; if event managers do their part to gender-balance their events; if reporters call on more women as expert sources, we should eventually reach gender-parity in our perception of who leads, who should be funded, who should sit on boards and who should get new leadership opportunities.
The headline read "Men named Michael outnumber female CEOs presenting at #JPM18". RSA was raked over the coals for booking just one female keynote (out of 20), Monica Lewinsky, for their cyber security conference. CES was taken to task for not finding any female keynotes.
The social media stream dishes out punishment in the form of hashtags, #AllMalePanel #NoManels. Conference organizers need to be more aware than ever before of gender-balance, inclusion and diversity, or suffer the consequences.“Manel” is industry jargon for a panel of featured speakers at a conference or event consisting entirely of men.
Creating a “No Manel Zone” at your event means you commit to not fielding any manels (a panel or a group of three or more speakers, with or without a moderator, entirely of men.)
But diverse panels are only part of the equation – conferences also need to consider:
And while the dangers of failure are apparent, there are also rewards to be reaped, including larger ticket sales, better quality programming and more wide-spread impact. Join the founder of Innovation Women, a new model "visibility bureau" designed to connect event managers (for free) to awesome speakers, presenters and experts who all just happen to be women.
This talk is for event managers, conference organizers and event management. It can be delivered as a talk or a workshop. It was originally created and delivered to the content providers for the NAB Show, one of the largest professional conferences of broadcasters in the world.
Big marketing budgets don't always guarantee big results. Big companies spend a fortune on their product launches—millions and millions of dollars—and even they don’t have all the budget they’d like.
Over the last decade, Bobbie Carlton helped to launch more than a 1500 new products...for free, using a social media powered methodology, crowdpromoting, anyone can learn and use.
This presentation is usually a big winner at startup and marketing events. To learn more, watch my TEDx presentation.
