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.
It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Funny)
I think the right word to describe this is FAIL [hoboken411.com]
You can't have your urinal cake and eat it too.
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Interesting)
The BBC ran a Money Programme show about social sites earlier in the year and a lot of the people interviewed were shocked and disappointed that their information was being skimmed for advertising purposes. They just wanted to be left alone to enjoy their online embroidery circles, or whatever. But at the end of the day someone has to pay. Assuming you're unable or unwilling to disable the ads isn't it better to be looking at TARGETTED ads rather than random ones?
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: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)
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Or is it that you have an extra processor in your brain, so when you are actually reading some email with the subj "[libSBML-discuss]", this additional processor records: "TigerLogic XML database" - useful! Check out SkywaySoftware.com. Wow! XSLT visual editor! and "easy to use"!?
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Marketing is supposed to make you spend money you wouldn't have otherwise spent?
No, marketings purpose is simply to get you to buy a given product.
Marketing is also intended to make you think about a brand or product, and this even works on cheap people like me. (I am almost never swayed to buy based on advertisements, because the thing being advertised is almost never the best price or value.) But even so, ads make a brand stick in my mind, and occasionally, in absence of all other information, I will buy the brand that I have heard of over the one that I haven't.
As for targeted vs. untargeted, I think I prefer targeted ads, because they are more li
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.
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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
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Actually, no. It's because it tastes better. I buy it when I either have a bit of extra cash or think that I'll have guests over for breakfast. So I do actually know what it tastes like. And before you start going on about how it tastes better because I've be
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He picked a bad example when he went for the orange juice. I have an empty carton of organic orange juice next to me right now - tastes much nicer than the non-organic and far, far better than the dilutable stuff. But in both your case and mine, we have come to that conclusion ourselves. It's not marketing that makes the organic stuff taste better. Our choice is informed by a different source of information (experience in this case) rather than advertising. So I agree with what you say but draw a different
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Advertisers want to get your eyeballs and eventually your money. But there is no way they can make you spend your money you would not have already planned on spending.
You are right. Advertisers can certainly influence what people buy, but the consumer is ultimately responsible for making the choice.
I, like a
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Funny)
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Perhaps there is a definition confusion here. I do not care if companies maintain informative (and, if they want, flashy) websites and show up on a web search for their product type. That is marketing, but it is not intrusive. Also, consumers are free to look up review sites which will probably be less biased than the company's own website to discover products.
On the other hand, advertisements show up when I am not looking for information on the product/product type they are advertising, and are therefore
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Another famous one was the "Back to the Future" Pepsi ads built into the movie. They're everywhere,
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On rare occasions this can even work in reverse [brawndo.com]. Thanks to product placement I found out that plants really crave this stuff (it's got electrolytes).
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Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Insightful)
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A good example is something like a carpet cleaner. I never had to worry about such things before I got my own apartment/house. But when I inevitably spilled something I went to Target and bought one of them. I bought Resolve beca
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Another viewpoint is that of classical economics, which holds that everybody is a strictly rational actor, seeking to optimize their own best interests. Under this model, more targeted advertising is better, since it provides you with new information w
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This argument is flawed on several levels.
First off, most marketing is supposed to make you choose one particular brand over another, as opposed to buying something
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.
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And you know about those features how? Packaging? Oh, that would be marketing's job.
Apologies, as you've probably realized, I meant to say there is no rational argument to be made for fashion.
Unless you're a soap maker. But still, let's look at something like cars then. Marketed to pro
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Don't like it; don't use it.
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.
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I think you'd have to go with a psychological motive rather than a basic biological motive.
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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.
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No, you can't. Using a javascript to do retarded things upon a right-click is old hat. Modern browsers let users disable that functionality.
Yeah, or someone could take 10 seconds to scan through the page's source code for images or use the handy "Media" tab in Firefox's "page info". Then, they have a direct link
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Don't forget those silly flash sites where you can't save images... with those usually you end up downloading the SWF and dumping the images/sounds from it with a tool.
Sometimes it gets more complicated (the SWF downloads the image files or another SWF with the image files separately) but then you can still see what happens in the decompiled SWF code. And if all else fails, Wireshark can trap all the HTTP traffic and you can identify individual files downloaded, and even rip the files from the captured H
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:4, Interesting)
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If you want only five of your closest friends to see that picture of you making out with your sorority sister, here's a thought...EMAIL IT TO THEM. Or tranfer it via IM. Or whatever. But DO NOT upload it to any hosting site, because even if it's 100% secure from the outside, you have no idea how many people have access to it from inside the
Re:It's a difficult balance (Score:5, Funny)
So...just as an example, where would those be?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Probably set up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Probably set up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably set up (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Probably set up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably set up (Score:5, Funny)
I,... I don't understand. Why do you put those two words so close together?
Re:Probably set up (Score:4, Funny)
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Call me an idealist, but journalistic integrity demands that the reporter follow up answers with questions about those answers. Answers which she could not have known when she started the interview. None of this touches on how an interviewer is supposed to find out what questions they are "allowed" to ask,
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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?
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Although you certainly wouldn't want to do an interview where you're prohibited from asking potentially incriminating questions, an ethical journalist will also keep the interview on-topic, and not spin off onto unrelated tangents for which the interviewee is completely unprepared.
It'd be like calling up George Bush for an interview about his education policy, and then grilling him about Iraq.*
(*This might not actually be a bad idea)
Too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Informative)
TFA is a waste of time.
Sensational headline - "Facebook founder heckled at web conference", yet providing no proof for this, nor any proof on why the interviewer was clueless.
A couple of bland quotes from Zuckerberg on the Yahoo bid and privacy issues. Good enough for a
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Well, you're setting the bar pretty low, there...
indeed (Score:2)
That's exactly what I wanted to know, given that it was the title of the article and worthy enough to be the topic of the first couple of paragraphs.
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
The interviewer just didn't do a good job, and was in front of people who witnessed it. The audience should have been more mature, the interviewer should have been more prepared, and a kid who sold his company for a staggering amount of money should have been more interesting.
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"You have to ask questions," he said.
Again, his line generated a massive cheer from the crowd.
By now, Lacy was becoming aware of how she was losing the crowd, and said, "Anybody who's seen my (TV) show...has seen me throw a whole glass of water on (Techcrunch founder Michael) Arrington."
With a sly look, Zuckerberg grabbed her water glass and moved it out of her reach.
She then tried to follow up the line of questioning about the journals, saying that one of the interesting things about his process was that he burned the journals when he was done with them.
"I don't do that," Zuckerberg said. "You made that up."
Shocked, Lacy called out to the back of the room where someone who had apparently sat and talked with Lacy and Zuckerberg the night before was sitting in an attempt to get confirmation that he had said he burned his journals.
Much as I dislike CNET, the above link seems to tell more than most sites, I recommend it, FWIW. In any case, the rage sounds justified.
scrabulous (Score:3, Funny)
how else am I going to fill the hours spent sitting in front of a computer whilst at work?
yahoo literati (Score:2)
Video of Sarah Lacy's version of what happened (Score:5, Informative)
She's made of Teflon(R), apparently.
Re:Video of Sarah Lacy's version of what happened (Score:5, Informative)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LxZ6-O5R1zs [youtube.com]
Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were Mark, I would hire a suit, and put him in front of the crowds, while I stood off to the side and wait for the 'inspirational answer' about the dreamy-dream utopian future and how my software was going to make it happen.
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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:Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Honestly, if it were me and my billion dollars of worth and I expected the company to last about five years, I'd just write myself a nice retirement package and plan on doing another 3 or so years of good and solid work. Then, I'd find a moderately palatable CEO corporate-type to run things, and spend the rest of my life pretending that it's still 1999.
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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, b
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Dream on; at current rates it takes a LOT more than 'several' million to do 'whatever you want for the rest of your life'. Every million is a lousy $20k/year or so in interest income, on which you pay tax. So the whopping sum of even $10M would put you comfortably upper middle class but hardly an out of control rock-n-roller if you wanted to keep it up.
Re:Get a suit, Zuck! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't survive and "do whatever you want" on 300K+ a year (for "several million") in interest income you're seriously being wasteful with your money. Or you're trying to buy shit that costs millions of dollars, which is generally being wasteful with your money, but agreeably doesn't fall into the category "whatever you want to do".
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http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2007ltr.pdf [berkshirehathaway.com]
To hit 10% a year, the DOW would close at 24,000,000. One way to look at it is to ask, are things going to improve more this century than they improved last century, or less(the upside is that if they improve more, mon
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At least slightly better Wired.com article (Score:5, Informative)
Sha handles it gracefully (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sha handles it gracefully (Score:5, Funny)
plan b (Score:4, Funny)
Who cares about privacy and portability... (Score:4, Insightful)
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2. Ask any (non-attention whore) movie/music/tv/sports star how important privacy is to them. You'd be rather surprised how much money & effort they have to spend to get the kind of privacy you and I take for granted.
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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"
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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.
That's the myth that's being perpetuated by those bending over. For me, my family and friends, it's much more important to be loyal to those around you, spend time together, etc. I could earn a lot more money than I do now, but I'd rather spend my weekends with my wife watching stupid movies and enjoying ourselves before we start raising a family.
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
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I have several friends making well into the 6 figures doing fairly routine program man
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HOWTO: Privacy on Facebook (Score:4, Informative)
Privacy on Facebook is relatively simple:
- Don't put any personal information into your profile.
- Don't add anyone to your friends whom you don't know personally.
- Don't add any applications and don't give any application permission to run.
- Ignore all "requests" and "invitations."
The only remaining thing is photographs and videos that you or your friends might upload or "tag" you in. I believe you have the choice to confirm the tags, or at least to untag yourself if you prefer not to be named in your friends' photos. I think this particular issue is not that important, because your pictures are probably on the Internet, and on Facebook, whether with or without your name, whether or not you're on Facebook, and you have no control over them anyway. Chances are, that's the case unless you never leave the house.Re: (Score:2)
TWiT and why the Interviewer sucked (Score:5, Informative)
Jason Calacanis (in the TWiT podcast) then explained that Sarah's been flirting with Mark for a very long time, and these softball questions are very unprofessional of her.
IMO She really needed a wake-up call -- SxSW live isn't print!
Drama 2.0 is dull (Score:2)
pimply-faces teens interviewing each other (Score:4, Informative)
Suckiness and sexism (Score:2, Insightful)
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For example, maybe her email is populargirl@facebook.com - now that is Flamebait just waiting to get p0wned.
Hacked? (Score:2)
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.
Re:My take on the interview (Score:4, Funny)
Is there any other kind?
Groupthink (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF... (Score:2, 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.