Talent

Talent are the people who present at your event: keynote speakers, panelists, workshop leads, or performers, or any other format where someone takes the stage. Events tracks them in two places: an event roster per event, and an org-wide talent directory that persists across events.

This tab used to be called Speakers, and the underlying data still is. The word changed because talent covers more than people who give a talk, like performers or panel guests, and any link or bookmark to the speakers page keeps working.

The Talent tab lives under Program in your event's sidebar. It needs two things at once: your workspace on a Pro plan, and the event itself set to Multi Day or Advanced format, which you pick when you create the event. Without both, the tab shows a locked panel.

Adding talent to the event

Open your event, go to the Talent tab, and click Add speaker. The form asks for a name (required) and optional email, company, job title, status, and speaker type.

If the email you enter matches an existing contact in your workspace, Mercleo links the entry to that contact automatically. When the existing contact has a weak auto-derived name, it overwrites the name with what you typed. If no matching contact exists, Mercleo creates a new contact via your contacts directory.

You can also add people from the org-wide Talent directory, reachable from your account's main navigation. Anyone in that directory can be added to any event roster without re-entering their details.

Roster fields

Each entry on an event roster has base contact fields (pulled from the linked contact) plus per-event overrides you can set without touching the contact record.

• Bio override: an event-specific bio that replaces the contact's default bio on this event's microsite and schedule. Leave it blank to fall back to the contact bio.
• Headshot: an event-specific photo. When set, it overrides the contact's avatar everywhere on this event.
• Topic interests: free-text notes on what this person covers. Operator-facing only; not shown on the microsite.
• Status: where this person is in your outreach flow. See Status meanings below.
• Speaker type: one of External, Internal, Community, or Sponsor rep. Used for internal categorization; not shown publicly.

The roster table has filters for status, type, and published state, so a growing roster stays easy to scan.

Status meanings

Status tracks where each person is in your outreach flow. There are five values:

• Prospect: on your radar but not yet contacted. Operator-only.
• Invited: outreach sent, awaiting response. Shows publicly when published.
• Confirmed: has agreed to present. Shows publicly when published.
• Declined: passed on presenting. Operator-only.
• Cancelled: was confirmed, then withdrew. Operator-only.

Publishing to the microsite

Publishing controls whether a profile card appears on the public-facing microsite. It's separate from status: you can have a Confirmed speaker who isn't published yet, or an Invited speaker you want to surface early.

Toggle Published on the row in the roster table, or from the detail sheet. Unpublishing someone removes them from the microsite immediately; their event roster entry and session assignments aren't affected.

Assigning talent to sessions

Adding someone to the event roster doesn't automatically put them on any session. You assign people to sessions from the Speakers section inside the session detail sheet.

Each session-level assignment has its own fields:

• Role: free-text, drawn from your workspace's speaker role options (e.g., Keynote, Moderator, Panelist). Shown to attendees in the session view. Configure your workspace's role options and custom profile fields from the settings page linked off any speaker's directory profile.
• Session bio override: a bio specific to this session. When set, it takes priority over the event bio override and the contact bio.
• Status: session-level status: Prospect, Invited, or Confirmed. Independent of the event-level status.
• Sort order: controls the display order within that session.

What attendees see

On the public microsite, published entries with a status of Invited or Confirmed appear in the talent section with their name, headshot, job title, company, and bio.

The public-facing tab an attendee sees for this section can be renamed per event (Keynotes, Panelists, whatever fits your program): see Event website for tab naming.

In the attendee-facing schedule, people appear on each session they're assigned to. The bio follows a priority chain:

1. Session bio override (if set on the session assignment)
2. Event bio override (if set on the event roster entry)
3. Contact bio (the default bio from the contacts directory)

Headshot follows the same logic: the event-specific headshot takes priority over the contact's avatar. Name, job title, and company always come from the linked contact record.