Comments on: The Instant Feedback Loop Can Kill Your Brand

By: I’m Not Going to SXSW | Creative Reason

I’m Not Going to SXSW | Creative Reason — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:05:31 +0000

[...] friends from St. Louis, Roberto and others. I will also miss trying to find a worse session that this one and then blogging about [...]

By: SXSWi – The Tale of Two Conferences | Spoken Whirred

SXSWi – The Tale of Two Conferences | Spoken Whirred — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:21:33 +0000

[...] Comments Patrick Powers on The Instant Feedback Loop Can Kill Your BrandDavid Meyer on Curly’s Law of MarketinguberVU – social comments on Curly’s Law of MarketingNate [...]

By: Patrick Powers

Patrick Powers — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:45:07 +0000

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.

By: Sam Eder

Sam Eder — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:38:01 +0000

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.

By: Brian Schwartz

Brian Schwartz — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:22:47 +0000

@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.