Hosting Duties

So you’ve read my previous article and thought, “Ok, I’d like to be/need to find a Dedicated Host for an event. But what do I need to look for?” Today we’re going to go over the strengths and weaknesses of getting a known personality to host your show, and what you need to know to become a good (or better) host. Don’t worry, a lot of this stuff is pretty simple. It’s more about unlearning some bad habits than it is mastering some arcane skills you’ve never heard of before.

But first we’re going to cover Known Personalities. When I covered Dedicated Hosts in my previous article, I focused a lot on Streamers because I was focused on hosting things I’ve hosted in the past like Card Game or E-sports Tournaments. But obviously there are many more types of events to cover, and by extension many more types of Known Personalities you could have as your dedicated host. Luckily, there isn’t much difference (at least as far as these articles are concerned) between the many different types of Known Personalities so we’re not going to make a distinction between them all.

Known Personalities come with a lot of benefits and drawbacks that can make them a tempting choice for Dedicated Hosting duties. One of the largest benefits people immediately think of is that they bring with them their large fanbases. If this is the benefit you’re expecting to get from having a Known Personality as your Dedicated Host, then you’re incredibly short sighted. The only part of their fanbase that’s going to follow along are the ones who share their interests with your specific event, or the most devout of their fanbase who aren’t particularly interested in what you’re doing so much as what their Known Personality is doing. What you really want a Known Personality for is their media training. Known Personalities tend to be people who have been on camera plenty of times before, or are people who have built up a following by exclusively being on camera. They know how to move a show forward, how to keep things interesting, how to direct peoples’ attention, and how to look and sound good on camera. Your Dedicated Host doesn’t need to have deep knowledge of what your event is about, but they also don’t need to have much surface knowledge either. As long as they know the bare minimum about your event, the Analyst can ease them through the event without much difficulty.

That said, there are two major downsides to using Known Personalities: Fanbase, and Ego. As mentioned earlier, most people think that bringing in the Fanbase of a Known Personality is a benefit. Again, this is incredibly short sighted. It is much more a mixed bag than one would think, as the fanbase of Known Personalities are a complete wildcard. Some Personalities have cultivated a healthy and polite fanbase, but more often than not these Personalities have either never thought to directly influence their fanbase or they play a caricature that actively cultivates toxic fanbases (intentionally or otherwise). This can cause more harm than good in some situations when their fanbases start harrassing the other attendees/viewers of your event. The second problem you’ll run into with Known Personalities is their Ego. It is not uncommon for Known Personalities to have inflated egos due to their popularity, and it can cause them to make some… questionable decisions. It can also make them into complete Divas, making weird demands to get them to do what you hired them for. If this is something you can afford to deal with, great! Go ahead, their star power can be a huge boon to your event! If not, don’t worry, we have another solution for you: just train your own dedicated host!

If you have to teach/learn from scratch, there are a few things you need t know. First and foremost: There is a natural human reaction to fill voids in conversation with sounds (umm, hmmm, ahhh, etc.). You need to break that habit as soon as possible. While it isn’t a problem in normal conversation, it absolutely shatters the flow of a show, so break it quickly. You might think the first thing you needed to learn would be something more directly related to show hosting or being an enjoyable personality, but trust me; if you fix this problem, it’s going to make you sound more confident, more authoritative, and give people a much better impression of you.

After that you need to learn how to move a conversation forward. This is something you do regularly, all the time in fact, but it isn’t something you’re used to doing consciously. This is a skill that’s surprisingly easy to train, it just requires paying more attention to your daily conversations. When you’re having a conversation with someone, you want to think about these things: What’s the current topic? When did you change topics? How did you change topics? Where did you add in something to keep the conversation moving? What did you add in? Why did you add that to the conversation? It can be a bit challenging to do all of this while actively having a conversation, so if you have the opportunity to record the conversation in some way that can be a huge help. You can also do this with other peoples’ conversations (movies, interviews, documentaries, etc.) but it is more effective if you use your own conversations. You’ll be able to get back into the headspace you were when you had the conversation which will make it easier to pick apart your conversation. Alternatively, get a friend and do some impromptu streaming/commentary on something you like! A game, a video, a performance, anything you two like, just so long as you record the commentary so you can go over it later.

Now we could stop the entire article right there. Just practicing those two things will put you well on your way to being a good and competent host. But we don’t have to settle for just “good.” With a little imagination and some preparation, you can turn a good show into a fantastic experience for your viewers. And to do that, we need to talk about how to build a narrative. After all, people love a good story, and creating an exciting narrative for each event can get people completely invested in the show.

So how do we build a narrative? First, you’ll need to decide what kind of narrative you wanna build. Are you telling an Underdog story? A struggle between two Long Battling Rivals? The classic tale of the Rising Star? When building a narrative for an event, it’s important to keep it simple so people can latch onto it without it being distracting. If your story is too complex, it will confuse people who are trying to understand the show. We want any narratives we build to not only be fun to listen to, but we want them to help people understand what’s going on. For example, if your running a tournament and all of the players have been relatively famous for a long time, trying to pin someone as the “Rising Star” could be more confusing than helpful. But once you decide what kind of story you want to run with, the rest is easy; simply plug people into the roles you think they would fit in and start weaving the story into your explanation of the event (where appropriate). Luckily you can create a template for these types of narratives in advance, making plugging in players/events into the narrative as simple as filling out a Mad Lib. Learning how to do this on a per event basis will make a you a better Host, but being able to do this on an individual basis can catapult you into a great Host.

And that’s the basics for finding/training a host. I Probably could have split this into two articles, spending more time fleshing out how to train a Host, but I feel I got the important things across. Future articles in this series will be more sporadic, releasing on a more “as I feel like it/think about” basis. That said, the next one in this series will likely be about running the audio/visual components of an event, so keep an eye out for that!