Duncan Davidson has a nice post listing several annoying habits some conference presenters have. Duncan of course notices these things since he’s often paid to photograph speakers, and these things make that more difficult than it should be. He includes several good ones including my favorite:

Please take off your name tag. This is self explanatory enough. If you wear your name tag on stage, you make my life easier for captioning. But, you don’t look as good in your photos or on video with a dork tag hanging around your neck. Don’t make my life any easier on this front.

The problem however isn’t the speakers. It’s also the conference organizers.

Conference organizers almost never give speakers any training, advice, suggestions, tip sheets. Nothing. They do absolutely zero to remind speakers of the stupid, easily avoidable, things like the ones Duncan points out. They could tape a simple checklist to the lectern, or even email it out in advance when the speaker signs up to speak.

It’s true conference organizers are very busy and have many things to juggle during an event, but since the event is always centered around the speakers, doing a few little things to up the speaker quality by 10% has to be worthwhile.