It’s been called a “train wreck” by journalists, attendees, and bloggers.
What am I talking about? Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday.
Part of the problem was Sarah Lacy, or at least her reputation. It’s a bit troubling for a journalist to be well known for pulchritude as well as professional snaps (with one magazine breathlessly calling her “the hottest reporter in technology”).
Part of the problem was Mark Zuckerberg, who for all intents and purposes resembled a painfully shy 8th grader instead of a billionaire founder of the planet’s most successful social networking site. I don’t think any reporter could have gotten him to open up on anything of substance.
The biggest part of the problem was the audience, and most importantly, their unwillingness to continue consuming an irrelevant discussion.
There they all were, with all their technological prowess, many of them sending Tweets out about how boring and off-track the keynote was. Those tweets not only bounced around the Internet, but were of course consumed by many people in the room.
Others who were liveblogging the event as it happened, with their Macbooks perched on their laps, added to the pressure cooker. Soon you had a virtual echo chamber: all the tweets and liveblogs collided with everyone reading the tweets and blog posts, and pretty soon you had a bunch of people already frustrated by the presentation rise up in rebellion.
To the casual observer, it looked like there was one presentation happening on stage, but an audience paying attention to an entirely different event at the same time.
Okay, check that. That’s precisely what was happening. Of course, interviewer and interviewee were unplugged and had no idea what was happening, except for a dawning realization that something was off kilter.
Eventually, the room hit some kind of tipping point (and boy do I hate these squishy terms, but they seem appropriate) and the virtual wall was breached. People in the crowd started to grumble, and then one person shouted “Talk about something interesting!” to everyone’s laughter.
Then came time for Q&A. All that pent up hostility just came out. Sarah, perturbed by the antics, said “Well, send me an email if you think I’m doing such a bad job!” which prompted the guy at the microphone to say, “What’s your email address?”
More laughter. More heckling. It finally wound down with a whimper and we all moved on to other sessions, but I could see others continuing the conversation via cellphone, Twitter, and liveblogging.
All of this stuff was eventually picked up on Digg, and then someone at Wired blogged about it, and then the story crashed into the Technology Press at large.
The event had become a media firestorm (albeit in a small niche) in the time it took to walk 100 yards to the nearest restroom and back.
Not to put the fear of God in you, oh marketers, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what the new generation out there is doing all the time.
They buy your stuff, talk about it, blog about it, tweet about it. Some of them aren’t even waiting to buy it. I’ve seen them tweet and moblog (mobile blog) about stuff while they’re in stores. Taking pictures with their cameraphones, uploading mobile video, liveblogging.
Whereas earlier Internet users planted a firewall between events and their online discussion of same, that era’s over. For this new group, it’s all one big hairball, with the virtual discussion often overshadowing the real world event they are covering.
Why is this so important to you? Imagine a world in which journalists from all spectrums of the media universe focused not on politics or the marketplace or human events, but on their reactions to the same.
Cogent coverage of the news item itself would diminish in favor of an ever-growing palimpsest of thoughts, feelings, echos, and tagents based on the news item. Clear thinking on any given subject would become a Gordian Knot of cultural dimensions that only the most savvy could interpret.
How do you as a marketer navigate this kind of world? RELEVANCE. That was the single biggest lesson of the Zuckerberg-Lacy fiasco. Lack of relevance caused a lot of rebellion.
These people had paid a lot of money to attend SxSW, and they wanted to hear Zuckerberg’s thoughts on privacy, tools, and social networking. And they were gravely disappointed.
Some might say (as I did right after the event occured) that these young ‘uns need to learn some manners–after all, not many of them would think to take a cell phone call in the middle of the event (okay, maybe some would). Nor would many of them have the guts to just walk out, or jump up on the stage and yell out “WTF! OMG, U R so l4m3″ or whatever the equivalent is.
But really, in the long run, the audience is right. They came expecting one thing, got something else, and didn’t lie down and just live with it. They knew they had an empowering technology at hand, and they wielded it to turn the tables on the whole power dynamic.
In sharp contrast to all this was the earlier session by Jared Spool. He spoke on using magic and illusion to help design great user experiences on the Web.
He peppered his talk with humor, some magic tricks, lots of great details, and a clean slide presentation that drove home important points. No 38 bullet points per slide. No kitschy backgrounds. No stupid transitions or zooming animations.
In the end, he tied the magic tricks in with the idea that web sites must have “delight generators” because that is what takes an experience over the top.
He got a standing ovation at the end, and about 100 people lined up to offer up their business cards so they could be signed up for his user experience newsletter.
Thus endeth the lesson.
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