Yesterday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed on stage at the SXSWi conference by former BusinessWeek journalist and author Sarah Lacy. It didn’t go well — Lacy, who can be a bit of a smarty pants, was channeling her inner David Letterman, asking off-the-wall questions, interrupting Zuckerberg and turning the focus of the interview toward herself and her new book about Web 2.0.
How do I know this? Because I have read all about it on the web today. I have watched the Zuckerberg-Lacy video, I have read the blow-by-blow blog account. I have watched a video of Lacy try to spin it as Zuckerberg’s fault, rather than her own.
And it’s not even noon here on the West Coast.
This post is about just taking a step back and marveling at what a wild, wired world we now live in, and stopping to think for a moment about the fact that it’s never going back to the pre-digital, pre-Internet era. Less than a day after this event occurred, there is exhaustive coverage, analysis and information about it on the web. In fact, this incident was being broadcast live by bloggers as it was happening, so there was almost no time after it began happening that it wasn’t part of the public consciousness.
One reason I blogged about this today is that I had just gotten off the phone with Mike Moran, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and one of PR’s brightest lights on the subject of adapting to Web 2.0. “PR people need to become experts in presenting the company” in all of its 24/7, online facets, Mike said. That includes anticipating situations like this and doing what you can to control or manage it.
Mike will be one of the speakers on a webinar I will be doing for Bulldog Reporter called “Thriving in the Future of PR: How Web 2.0 Is Transforming the Communications Business.” We’ll be joined by Bob Pearson of Dell and Aedhmar Hynes of Text100. It’s going to be great panel.
