I’m somewhat torn on this: The year the audience keynoted. Background: while interviewing Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sarah Lacey didn’t ask the questions audience members found interesting. As such, they essentially took over the interview. Much of the criticism is directed at Sarah, which I think is unfair. It takes effort (courage??) to get in front of a large group of people and conduct an interview. To chastise her for “not doing a good job” seems unfair. It’s easy to have off days - I have many presentations I would like to go back and do again. The real issue here is that conference organizers failed to acknowledge the talent and interest of the audience. The problem resides with organizers, not the interviewer. Unfortunately this is being cast as a “mob rule” situation, which is only partly true. It’s really about failed expectations.
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I listened to a podcast that dealt with this situation in some detail (TWIT) and one thing they discussed was the limited understanding of the Lacey with the audience. She also came across as quite enamored with Zuckerberg. (I watched the whole thing) The audience was certainly looking for some more hardball questions and she was serving up big fat soft ones.
As well, they talked about how twitter really created a tight group mentality (mob) and the back channel took over. So I really think there’s something to be said about understanding the role and power of the backchannel. But yes, the organizers should have been aware of this.