The Instant Feedback Loop Can Kill Your Brand
Just sat through the first 10 minutes of arguably the worst session at SXSW2010. It had a great title – Interactive Agency Workflow: Design and Development Process – and based on the full room and the fact that SXSW staff were doing a “1-in 1-out” process to keep the room from going over fire code capacity, you could tell a lot of us IA agency folks were looking for real insights.
Unfortunately, the material was nothing new, was presented in a non-visual way and became very sales-y, very quickly. Almost instantaneously the tweets started out about the presentation:
Fail
The exodus began and everyone started ganging up on the guys who presented on twitter. (Don’t believe me, see for yourself here, the results are funny and sad). I ended up feeling bad for the presenters… because they were unable to stop the onslaught (presentation was built already and underway, the only feedback they were getting at the time was the people leaving the room). But online the slaughter was on and has continued since it ended. I felt bad, but in the end their session should have been better. So it truly was a mistake.
This experience got me thinking about the type of effect a failed brand touch can have on your business. This could be a bad presentation, a failed webinar, a buggy product launch or any other number of things.
In the ‘old days’ if you make a presentation and it doesn’t go well, you chalk it up as a learning experience, your audience chalks it up as a waste of time and you both move on, probably to never interact again. Prior to social media if you had a product that failed to deliver, people could call or email you (or the Better Business Bureau), but rarely did they have the means for public, instant feedback and an audience of interested readers.
Since the dawn of social media, feedback is instantaneous and often it’s brutally honest. What can you do to protect your brand reputation in the days of social media (besides not giving horrible presentations)?
Make Sure You Know You Failed
Sure there were clues during the presentation (people leaving and potentially chuckling quietly), but the folks from Archetype probably didn’t know how bad it was until they look at the twitter hash tag search results. You need to make sure you know you failed and are being flogged online, to do this you need to:
- Monitor the results of brand searches – use twitter and google searches (or a twitter tool or client, rss feader, google reader, etc) and save searches for your company name and key terms.
- Solicit feedback from others at the event. Hopefully you have people at the presentation who will give you constructive criticism (if you don’t, you should, this will help you improve your public speaking and presence).
You Know You Failed, Now What?
- Publicly acknowledge your mistake(s). This is important and should be through a public forum (blog post, tweet, press release, web page, etc). Once acknowledged, start reaching out to the people who are publicly pointing a finger at you and apologize that they had a bad experience and insist you’ll try better next time. Honestly most people will stop publicly flogging your company if you just acknowledge the source of their frustration, sincerely apologize and tell them you strive for improvement.
- Strive for improvement. Fix the problems and try to prevent them from happening again.
- Move on to hopefully bigger and better things.
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FYI: I have a lot of other posts queued up and will be publishing them daily for the next few days. This one came out first since it was the most timely.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by tanyanoel: RT @creativereason: The Instant Feedback Loop Can Kill Your Brand & what to do to fix it (new post): http://is.gd/aDVmd #sxsw #iaagencyworkflow…
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Great post, Brian. Dead-on advice and very insightful.
I’m wondering what thoughts you have on how these guys might have monitored the Twitter traffic live and adjusted real time. I mean, if real-time feedback is a reality, then shouldn’t professionals be prepared?
I’m pretty good on my feet, so I could see myself saying “Well, folks. Twitter chatter is telling me the material I’m presenting sucks, so I’m going to chuck the prepared stuff and just talk with you instead. What were you expecting to learn? What burning questions do you have?”
Thoughts?
Thanks Gill. The more I have thought about this the more I’m convinced they should have been real time monitoring the hash tag. They had three presenters from the same company and they would have been able to manage this without being too distracted.
Gary Vaynerchuk did this last year during a panel when someone tweeted that he was acting like a jerk he asked the crowd who tweeted it and why she thought so. They ended up having a healthy debate about it during the session.
Seen this in action during a keynote. Fortunately we had lunch in front of us at the time.
I try to remember that a presentation is NOT about my company or me. I am there to give and help people. It is kinda cool and scary that we can get immediate feedback during a presentation.
I heard about this session from a couple of guys yesterday. And you’re right…it wasn’t pretty at all. But here’s the thing about instant feedback via Twitter backchannel: it’s tough as hell to monitor it in real time. Unless you’re a natural improv guy like Gary V, when you’re on stage you’re just trying to get through the experience. You have a presentation and you’re keeping your talk within the guardrails. That might just be me and could be a sign I need to work on my style.
Brian, what I like are your recommendations. If you can’t alter course during the session, take the time to figure out what could be corrected for the next one. I know if I suck during a presentation, it might hurt to hear the feedback but its there…and its still a gift to be accepted. Hopefully the folks at Archetype will accept their gift and commit to improving for the future.
Brian,
Maybe it’s a personal thing with me, but I can’t stand to sit through an hour of scripted monologue. I want *dialogue*. To wit, I structure my presentations at exactly half of the allotted time.
The latter half is solely reserved for Q&A. I want people to have the opportunity to ask real questions about their real situations, to challenge me on points I’ve made, and in situations like the one you describe where you’ve laid a giant turd I want the opportunity to recover both for myself and the audience (not to mention this approach solves the issue of a presentation running long. In the end I find far more people coming up to me after presentations asking about something that came up in Q&A than was in my actual materials.
It definitely requires being more prepared than you would have to be to simply give a rote presentation, and the ability to think on your feet. But I don’t see that as a bad thing. To me this approach is my golden parachute out of a bad situation. It works for me.
@Chris – Thanks for the comment Chris. I agree it’s tough to monitor in real-time and I’m pretty ADD so I would probably get too distracted by them anyway
In this session Archetype had three people so maybe one could have realized what was going on and at his next opportunity to speak, tried to change course?
I hope these suggestions work for people who’ve had any sort of public failure. It’s hard to admit defeat but try to learn from the experience (and criticism) and and move on.
@Matt – Thanks for the comment. I try to do a similar thing when I present, but I lean towards 3/4 of time used on preso 1/4 Q & A. But I always try to start with questions for the crowd, just to get the interaction happening and crowd involved before I dive into content. I also pause for questions a few times during a presentation.
I agree those give you a nice opportunity to get more involved and be able to pull off saving a presentation. Some rote presentations are ok if the speaker(s) have compelling content and a good presentation style. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of those times.
@Chris Love – Getting a sales pitch at a conference you pay to attend is annoying and disrespectful to the audience. It’s worse (and pointless) when you are in an audience of your peers. Hopefully they’ll learn from this lesson.
Over the last 2 years I’ve seen these best practices put in place to make sure the room doesn’t turn against you:
1) Asking the crowd what they want to hear ahead of the talk.
2) Fielding questions relatively early in the talk or scheduling multiple times for QA in the session
3) Having someone who only monitors twitter and passes info to the moderator (I was the twitter monkey for a couple of panels last year)
I was in the workflow panel and, yeah, it was as bad as it looks on twitter.
I think this all boils down to Rule No. 1 of presenting in public: Know thy audience.
The last thing a bunch of IA agency folks want from a SXSW presentation is a sales pitch. I had the pleasure (displeasure?) of a similar experience at the HighEdWeb Conference last fall. The speaker gave no thought to what the audience was hoping to hear and his presentation failed miserably. The Twitter backchannel lit up with similar spite, as chronicled on several blogs: http://doteduguru.com/id3712-the-great-keynote-meltdown-of-2009.html
Great post.
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[...] friends from St. Louis, Roberto and others. I will also miss trying to find a worse session that this one and then blogging about [...]