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
Great points!
You know that the interviewer was the only person NOT aware of the twitter conversation happening invisibly around him!
In fact I’d bet that Evan Williams knew it was happening… saw it was going bad fast (based on the reaction of the attendees)… and purposefully let the thing go down in flames.
Don’t be surprised if he uses it as evidence of the value of his platform in the near future!
Yep, no doubt about it. Evan had to know it was going down in flames.
It was a disappointing interview because Evan would say something brilliant, paradigm changing and the interviewer would be completely clueless as to the gravity of Evan’s remarks. And thus, no push back or further exploration in depth.
He made one remark that was particularly interesting, which was - they think of Twitter as a global information network.
It would have been great to get deeper into that point.
Even if Evan did consciously let the interview go down in flames, I still feel somewhat embarrassed for him. Perhaps it was due to the gravity of the debacle. I wonder if he had any say in the selection of the interviewer.
Sadly, the subsequent keynote was equally terrible (or close to it). Not only does the interview need to listen and pivot to the audience, but so does the SxSWi 2011 planning committee.
Matt
It’s funny because for years after the panels are finished they hand out those comment/ rating cards.
I wonder if the SxSWi organizers read and take them into account.