Mass walkout on @ev at #SxSW
By Ivo Vegter. Filed in sxswsa |Tags: Evan Williams, mondaykeynote, sxsw, sxswsa, Twitter, Umair Haque
Call it cognitive dissonance. Or dissociative absurdity. Umair Haque might have called it “interesting”. If there was one presentation, tweeted one disgruntled attendee, that needed a backchannel on-screen, this was it.
Half an hour before the “keynote interview” with Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, the queue stretched the length of the Austin Convention Center. Along with a row of other bescarved South Africans, I find myself front and centre, in row seven. We’re excited to be there. There are half a dozen other large ballrooms to which @ev is being broadcast. All networks – wi-fi, 3G, GSM, the works – are heavily overloaded. The expectation is palpable as the huge hall fills to capacity.
Then Umair Haque of Harvard Business Review walked in, with his interviewee, and the afternoon went pear-shaped.
Excited throngs before Evan Williams keynote
It started well, with an announcement by Williams of a new product for content publishers which allows them to integrate Twitter tools better with their websites. These tools open in a floating box, and allow readers to easily log in, or follow writers or topics, directly from the byline or keyword. It’s useful to Twitter users, because it makes discovery and connection easier. As a revenue generating model, it will not impose advertising on Twitter users, which is promising.
The lesson Williams says he learnt from Twitter is that your initial assumptions are almost always wrong, so you have to be willing to experiment and correct errors and move on. This goes as much for the product, which was forged more by its openness to users, and how developers adapted it to specific purposes, as for the business model. The openness of Twitter (as opposed to mere transparency, when users can look but not touch), is a survival mechanism.
That was, said Haque, interesting. So were all the rest of the platitudes that he set Williams up for. This wasn’t William’s fault, of course. But Haque looked unprepared, and much too often fell back on self-absorbed musing about how the latest interesting comment related to something he had recently written about.
Occasionally, Williams made an impression, such as when he related the e-mail from someone in Chile who’d used Twitter during the aftermath of the recent earthquake, and was very grateful for its existence. “We’re living terrible days after the earthquake, and thanks to Twitter, we can find people, help people, spread warnings…”
He added that it had always been Twitter’s goal to reach the least connected in the world, which is why the SMS channel remains key to its strategy. “This is why SMS is still important, and we’re seeing strong growth in places like India, where SMS is ubiquitous, and we’re hearing back from these regions that it’s of tremendous value to them.”
However, the interviewer let down the audience badly. He seem ill-prepared, and entirely unable to engage even Williams, let alone the audience. In my notes, I described him as “[I]nept. He waffles, he repeats what Williams has already said, and he finds everything an interesting point.” “He is so pompous,” said my neighbour. “Evan Williams #SXSW keynote boring — can haz better, less pompous interviewer?” agreed @planettroy on the back channel.
The exodus started. One wag posted to Twitter: “The queue to get out was longer than the queue to get in.”
“Should have kept the #mondaykeynote to 140 characters,” chirped @zuno. And @mikeminer: “Every time the moderator says ‘let me talk for a minute about. . .’ a baby angel dies in heaven.” Added @chrisbergman: “Score. Just saw @guykawasaki walk out on the #mondaykeynote Guess he has betterness figured out.”
Yup, Haque talked for a minute about something he calls “betterness”.
I didn’t fly 48 hours to Texas to be insulted by an interviewer who didn’t prepare for a keynote. I got up from front and centre, and joined the throng at the door.
Says @stitchmedia: “#mondaykeynote w/ @ev is being called a trainwreck. I can assure you it wasn’t. Trainwrecks keep my eyes open, this did not.”
Leslie Jensen-Inman, whom I met shortly afterwards, described it the best: “The #mondaykenote is like the Titanic. The moderator is the iceberg and everyone is running for the life boats.”
Kawasaki, hosting a panel of his own immediately afterwards, began: “My name is Guy Kawasaki and I have an extensive vocabulary and no affiliation with Harvard.”
This is an object lesson on so many levels. If you’re moderating, engage the audience, and stop talking about yourself for a minute. If you’re on stage, ignore the back channel at your peril. And if you’re going to address an audience of thousands, many of whom travelled far to get there, and queued for an hour in the hope of not being relegated to one of the half-dozen overflow halls, have the common courtesy to prepare, rehearse and put on something that’s worth the (very expensive) price of admission. A modern audience will not have the common courtesy to stay put and show respect you have not earned.
To Evan Williams’s credit, this is how he responded: “@ev: I heard on the backchannel that people want me to answer tougher questions. What’ya want to know? Will answer 10. Go.
That earns respect. But don’t ever inflict Umair Haque on us again, m’kay?
