Facebook Interviewer Heckled at Web Conference 179
jriding writes "Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old billionaire, was the keynote speaker at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Business Week journalist Sarah Lacy took the stage to question Zuckerberg, but the audience quickly grew tired of the topics she focused on, claiming that the real issues were being ignored.
"Never, ever have I seen such a train wreck of an interview," claimed audience member, Jason Pontin." The audience apparently wanted to know more about privacy and portability issues, which I guess shouldn't surprise anyone here.
Too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably set up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Probably set up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably set up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:5, Insightful)
Mating urge (Score:5, Insightful)
Fanning out a brightly coloured tail, making loud noises, dancing and many many other things that make them more obvious to potential mates, but at the same time more vulnerable to predators.
Posting pictures of yourself in panties, passed out or french kissing on a "social" website is about the same thing.
Who cares about privacy and portability... (Score:4, Insightful)
money and reality (Score:4, Insightful)
We live in a society, on the way to be adopted globally, where capitalism is interpreted so narrowly that we have only one linear metric for success: cash.
When you are a billionaire, you can pay for participating in situations where the pitcher tosses you softballs, and if they don't you have enough power to never have to go to bat with them again. Knowing this, the cowardly sheep in the media duly bend over and give deference to rich people. It's not wrong, it just is the way it is when money is the *only* metric we use to evaluate a person's value.
If you have not heard the phrase: "It's just business"
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
No, marketing is supposed to make you spend money you wouldn't have otherwise spent. If not that, then it's supposed to make you spend money on an option you wouldn't have otherwise chosen. It does this through emotional manipulation, rather than presenting facts and arguing them well, so the better marketed option is usually not the best one.
So ads that are targeted towards me are likely to induce me to spend money I would not have otherwise, and they're likely to make me choose a less optimal option by manipulating my emotions. Random ads are less likely to affect my behavior, so I find them more acceptable. There's really *nothing* good that can come from exposure to marketing.
Re:money and reality (Score:3, Insightful)
People lose sight of the fact that money is nothing more than a means to an end, and if you're living life for anything but happiness, you need to get hit by the clue stick. Being rich doesn't hurt anything, and I wouldn't turn down a billion dollars if someone offered it, but I wouldn't give up my current life for a six-figure salary; it's just not worth it.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want specific pictures of yourself being available to everyone, don't make them available to anyone. No matter how "secure" you make it, the internet makes it possible for just one person with the time and know-how to circumvent security and share the content (or the method of circumvention itself) with the rest of the world. Tangent: The same can be applied to copy protection schemes...it just takes one person to render them useless at preventing all but casual "hey can you copy that disk for me?" piracy.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
No, marketings purpose is simply to get you to buy a given product. Whether or not you'd have bought that product or a similar one is irrelevant, the purpose is to increase the chance that you buy that particular one, contributing to the revenue of that company who is producing the widget.
Some advertisements use emotional manipulation. Some are informational, aesthetic, logical, or price based. It's a big competitive soup of screaming focussed on getting one thing, YOUR dollar.
I have a few dollars, some expendable, and I am willing to part with them for the right thing, stuff I would have bought anyway, as well as new and innovative products that I gotta have. For me it's DJ gear and music, for some it's antique art.
Personally, I mind LESS if the ads are targeted to me. and there is a better chance I might actually buy some of the ads i have "opted in" for. Unlike the mass advertisements, for example, McDonalds, who waste millions on advertising and will never convince me to buy another hamburger, I don't fall for their crass bullshit. 100% Beef my Ass!
Ads are here to stay, they suck for the most part, but they power the finances that drive the web, so we can't get rid of all of them. Click an ad for something you support today!
(and put a bunch of people you don't into your host file)
Re:Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:2, Insightful)
Not to imply your not talented, or event hat perception is everything. Just that perception is something, and something that is probably worth it when you are trying to overvalue your company at such ridiculous levels.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:1, Insightful)
Lets think about it this way. In the absence of marketing a wise, informed consumer will pick the best option for their needs. So marketing can't influence that choice if it's already optimal. The only thing for marketing to do is to convince you that their non optimal choice is optimal. i.e. the entire purpose of marketing is to mislead.
Suckiness and sexism (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it sound like there's an optimal product out there that all consumers would be best off buying.
To use a real-life example, I can't afford to spend lots of money on orange juice. If I did, I would buy the organic brand with no added anything. However I don't buy the store brand, because it tastes terrible (too sweet). So instead I buy a mid-range brand.
All of those brands have good reasons to exist and reasons to advertise. (To remind people to buy orange juice, to explain what they're all about, etc.) None of the brands are trying to manipulate people into buying something they don't want, simply to provide the right product to the right people.
Re:Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:2, Insightful)
Given that he has several million dollars that probably aren't going anywhere(which is enough money to do whatever you want for the rest of your life), why should he care more about what certain people think than he cares about having fun? So he can make sure that he is worth $2 billion on paper, and then 4?
I can see where it would be more fun to not put up with a bunch of inane questions from bloggers, but that isn't what you said.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that was the gist of the second sentence of my post.
Secondly, what you term 'emotional manipulation' is generally referred to as branding. In many cases a rational argument cannot be made for why you should buy one brand or another.
If they're not distinguishable by features, then choose on price. If they're the same price, it really doesn't matter. But you'll be hard pressed finding any recognizable brand that doesn't have a cheaper no-name alternative.
For example there is rational argument to be made for fashion.
There is? Do tell.
Also, lots of brands are marketed using rational argument. Some sort of facts form the basis of most ads, but obviously a 30-second TV spot isn't exactly long enough to go into depth about (say) soap composition.
Just because facts are used doesn't mean the argument is rational. It's not truth, it's truthiness.
Besides which, it's a sad fact that most of the general population don't understand lipid composition all that well, and even if they did, they don't care about it.
True, but soap choice is hardly an important decision for one to make.
If your emotions are really manipulated by what happens in the commercial breaks, then I'd suggest that advertising is the least of your problems.
Oh that's just being silly. Obviously I'm not becoming distraught because of advertisments. But to claim that the constant barrage of emotionally laden imagery has no effect on you is just silly.
Lastly, even if we were to accept your arguments, it doesn't follow that the 'better marketed option is usually not the best one'. At best you're arguing that they're uncorrelated, but I would make a counter-argument that a company that has a competent marketing department is more likely to have other competent departments, and therefor will be making a better product.
No, my arguments didn't directly show that, but from experience that seems to be the case. Companies that make crappy products tend to make up for it with marketing. Companies that make excellent products don't need to trick people into buying them.
Full disclosure: I work in advertising
This [youtube.com] is for you.
Re:Probably set up (Score:2, Insightful)
Speaking of which, why is the summary pretty much an unabashed, word for word copy and paste of the initial paragraph or two of the article? Isn't that plagiarism or something? Or is it different when it comes to reporting a news story, a la Reuters? Anyone?
Re:Video of Sarah Lacy's version of what happened (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:TWiT and why the Interviewer sucked (Score:-1, Insightful)
And of course random podcasters are totally credible.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of third party sources of product information.
You make it sound like there's an optimal product out there that all consumers would be best off buying.
No, but there is always an optimal choice that balances all the factors that play into the decision.
Lets look at your example for a minute. Mid-range orange juice is your optimal choice, but the marketing of the organic OJ has you thinking that if you made a little more money you'd choose them. Why? Because it's labeled organic it must be better?
What's the difference really? Both are made from carbon, so I'm guessing by "organic" they mean they don't use any pesticides. Well how much pesticide is there in the non-organic OJ? Is there any evidence that non-organic OJ hurts people? If the store were selling tainted OJ shouldn't you take that up with the FDA instead of just buying the more expensive non-tainted OJ?
That right there is the kind of harmful emotional manipulation I'm talking about. They're trying to make people think they're making wise purchasing decisions when it's really just based on bullshit.
Re:Probably set up (Score:1, Insightful)
My take on the interview (Score:5, Insightful)
She kept rambling on and not asking straight-forward questions (they were more statements than questions). Advertising herself and telling her own stories rather than interview the person we were there to hear from. And her response afterwards (seen in one of the youtube links in these comments) is even more appalling. It seems she did no research about the crowd she was interviewing in front of, which caused a huge problem. And to add the comment about how SXSW won't get another big person. Does she realize that last years keynotes were Dan Rather and William Wright (both of with were awesome interviews/presentations). She may be a good writer, but doesn't have a clue how to run a proper live interview.
And not to put all the blame on her, Mark did not help the situation at all. He repeated the same statements over and over, felt like he just kept repeating himself. He also didn't see like the best public speaker (not to say I'm good at it), but he didn't seem ready for what he was thrown into. He could have done some work to steer the presentation in a way that he wanted, but I don't believe he's had enough experience to do this.
Groupthink (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the middle ages (Score:3, Insightful)
The Facebook generation, essentially a gibbering gaggle of binge drinking ADD retards, are now in charge. In a few more years you can expect another Cultural Revolution that will make 'Idiocracy' look like a documentary.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't like it; don't use it.
Re:My take on the interview (Score:1, Insightful)
You try having sex on stage and not being awkward.
No, he gets it... (Score:1, Insightful)