I’m just now getting caught up and piecing together my thoughts from South by Southwest Interactive. In case you haven’t heard, the biggest keynote #fail was that of Twitter founder Evan Williams who was interviewed by Umair Haque of Harvard Business Review.

Twenty to thirty minutes into the interview the audience packed in the auditorium began leaving in droves. A quick search for the Twitter hash tag for the keynote #MondayKeynote turns up disgruntled after disgruntled remark about the the interview.

Reading the tweets from the keynote it’s clear the interviewer did not know the audience and severely underestimated the sophistication of the audience present.

The questions were dull, feel-good softballs served up to an audience that wanted depth and critical conversation.

The interview was a one-way conversation that was more political stump than interactive conversation, which an audience like those at SxSWi have grown accustomed to participating in.

The Backchannel Abandoned

It’s ironic that the company responsible for pioneering backchannel communications would fail to use the backchannel to listen and react in real time.

If Umair had been remotely aware of the conversation that was swirling around the room in his midst, the interview could have been a huge success and testament to the power of Twitter.

Don’t Fail Your Panel or Keynote: Listen

The keynotes and panels I attended, which were failures all had one thing in common. The participants failed to listen in real-time. It’s too easy to listen using Twitter. Think of it as a real time focus group.

Most of the panels where the participants did listen were like rocket fuel. They were fast, fun, engaging and I walked away actually learning something.

Listen and Pivot

Listening isn’t enough. The panelists have to do something with that information. One of my favorite panels was the Community Innovation Summit #CommunityInnovation. It was awesome. You can follow that hash tag and see exactly how the panelists interacted with the audience.

Not only did they interact with the audience, but that interaction shaped critical pivots in the panel to give the audience (and the panelists for that matter) what they wanted.

Panelist Dave Mcclure was a #hashtag DJ monitoring that backchannel, interacting with the channel and still remained fully engaged with the panel discussion. Absolutely awesome to see and experience. That level of interaction made this one of the most valuable and entertaining panels I attended.

Don’t Forget to Listen

I’ll make the point one more time. Listen. Listening is marketing and marketing is listening. Pay attention to the backchannel.

Do you have a failure of listening to report?

Photos by Flickr/ Randy Stewart