Donald Clark’s blog alerted me to the recent audience revolt at the SXSW Interactive conference keynote. Business Week reporter interviewed 23 year old billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
I wasn’t at the conference, but I’ve been reading about the event, and reaction to it with interest. What does it tell us about the wired world, interactivity and conferences? And what implications does it have for the Learning and Skills Group Members’ Conference on April 30th?
‘Revolt’ is probably too strong a word. The interview just fell to pieces towards the end, with a vocal audience making its feelings felt. If you want to view the whole thing, it’s available at allfacebook – the unofficial facebook blog.
But actually, you can get the highlights by going to comment 12 on the blog entry, which points out where things broke down:
The obvious candidate for tipping point comes right here (49:00), when he tells her to ask questions and the crowd cheers for half a minute.
Bingo.
There has been a lot of talk on the ‘net about how the crowd wanted to get more from Zuckerberg and were fed up with Lacy’s low-grade questioning. Fuelled by twitter mails and blogs to each other, their seized the initiative and demanded higher-quality questions. Some are claiming this is the moment that Web 2.0 took over.
It’s simpler than that.
The audience just wanted real information. From Zuckerberg’s comment, it looks like he wanted to give it, too.
Donald Clark pretty much sums it up when he says:
Speakers need more passion, more fun and more controversy. Why attend a conference to hear things you already know?
In short: this was just an interview that didn’t work out because the interviewer was inadequately prepped for the audience. She didn’t know how they were likely to react, or indeed enough of what they wanted to hear (see Lacy’s own reaction here, with a scattering of very unpleasant comments, and a rather lovey review from PR 2.0 here).
This audience would have undoubtedly have preferred a short positioning statement from Zuckerberg, some establishing questions from Lacy, and then – after say 15 minutes – an open floor discussion, moderated by Lacy, but only where necessary. When you have someone like Mark Zuckerberg on stage, you want to maximize his speaking time.
The only role web 2.0 technology had in this was to accelerate and exacerbate an existing discontent in the audience.
So – what lessons does this have for anyone involved in putting on conferences? As I say, I don’t think it’s anything dramatically new. Increasingly, conference have to be produced through greater collaboration with audiences for the practical reason that with change occurring faster, the audience is in the best place to know exactly what it wants to hear.
To make this work, there must be real trust between organisers and audience, so that the audience feels that if it asks for a particular speaker to be heard, or a particular topic to be covered, it will be covered, and adequately.
That in turn means that speakers must be able to trust the organisers and conference audience to be given a chance to engage in open dialog. And the onus is on all speakers to respect that trust by being honest with audiences and sharing failures as well as successes, and being ready to answer the tough questions when they come.
Subscribe
Stumble It!