By now, if you pay attention to the tech news at all, you'll have heard about the aboslute train wreck the Mark Zuckerberg keynote was at South by Southwest. I'm not chiming in with anything particularly new I don't think, but I did want to offer up my take, especially after taking some time to digest it and talk to some people about it. The general consensus is that Sarah Lacy of Business Week did a shite job. Her interview was pure fluff and was completely lacking in actual questions. More than once, Zuck said "was that a question?" It was almost as though she went out of her way to embarass the poor guy and was more interested in landing a piece of him for herself than she was in actually asking questions that mattered to the three rooms full of geeks watching.   Image originally uploaded by kk+   Zuckerberg has been very very carefully media trained, and whoever he worked with did a good job. He stayed on message, never ever deviating, and was about as flat as he was on 60 minutes. I think that's his "interview" face. Or his schtick - one or the other. He's still very young and needs some more time to become better at the interviews, better at answering questions without sounding like he's simply repeating what he was taught. I don't particularly like it, and agree with the twitterer in BlogHaus who said "Zuckerberg is about as articuate as a rock", but I'll cut him a tiny bit of slack because he is so young.   My problem was with Sarah and the fact that she acted like a ditz; twirling her hair, asking about his thoughts on his "Forbes Youngest Billionaire" status and doing the leg-uncross-recross-and-lean-in-show you my-cleavage move. Telling stories about Mark that sounded like she was trying to prove to the audience that she knew him and that in turn, managed to embarass him. There was nothing good about the interview (scratch that, it wasn't an interview; it was a conversation between two people, only on stage) and it set twitter on fire with people talking about it and riffing on the in room hecklers.   QueenofSpain (Erin Kotecki Vest) [@queenofspain], HuffPo contributor among others, has offered her take here; Brian Solis talked to Sarah herself to find out what her thoughts were. There's lots more. Just Google it.   The one redeeming thing that Zuck did was to co-opt some time at the Facebook Developers conference and do an Open Q&A. I haven't heard, or looked for, many respones to this move yet, but I'm applauding the move from a PR point of view.  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please sign in:
Email

Password



Forgot your password?
or Join