Meeting Attendees seize Control - Web 2.0 at it's worst
This is a true story.
Moving from La Guardia Airport to my hotel in the Upper West Side of NYC last Wednesday, I glanced through Corbin Ball's e-zine with particular interest on his article "The Speaker-Audience Balance is Shifting" on my Treo. Having just posted a blog on Web 2.0, I was compelled to read more.
"Web 2.0 technology is moving the balance of power from the speaker to the audience," Corbin opens with this understated statement in his article.
Corbin goes on to write about a shocking incident at the March 2008 annual "South by Southwest Conference" held in Austin, TX which involved a live interview with the 23-year old billionaire founder & CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, a BusinessWeek columnist named Sarah Lacey and an increasingly impatient & surly audience during a Keynote Plenary session.
What happened next is every Conference organizer's worst nightmare.
As the session's live interview drug on, attendees "pulled out their cell phones and started twittering. (www.twitter.com) Twittering is a Web 2.0 phone-based networked community (think text-message meets the chat room.) Text comments about how 'lame' the session was started flying in the hall. The audience increasingly became dissastisfied. Someone posted a dare to yell out "Zuck you suck". Someone took up the offer. And the whole session devolved from there. As the social media took over, the crowd started shouting out questions on their own. The session went off the rails from there," Corbin writes. Click here to read the article in entirety. Many of the actual participants were far less staid & polished in their description of the event.
While reading this, I began to envision the Jerry Springer-style mutiny, how with nothing other than cellphones & web access, these attendees revolted. They stormed the stage & took over the microphone both virtually, then literally-- demanding that their unprecedented voice to be heard, like a group within the confines of Lord of the Flies gathering together to overthrow the island & shouting 'Enough! We demand to be heard.' (Read another far less genteel account here in blog on Wired Blog Network.)
While I would have loved to have personally witnessed this revolution, I would lay money that SXSW will approach things differently next year. They'll clearly be more proactive in harnessing the power of Web 2.0 for their future conferences.
In fact, here's what they had to say "Certainly the most-talked about session of this day was the Mark Zuckerberg Keynote interview, as conducted by Sarah Lacey of BusinessWeek. For better or for worse, this interview forcefully demonstrated how new technologies enable formerly disconnected crowds to effectively communicate with each other about their feelings -- in this case, their dislike of the content at hand."
Read the official SXSW comments here.
I share this story with you NOT to scare the daylights out of you. But rather to again say that there IS a new breed of meeting attendee. And their weapons of the day include nothing other than Web 2.0 and a cellphone.
Arm yourself before going out there.
Don't think that your group is techno-saavy enough to use these weapons? Perhaps not today, but someday soon. I promise. Unless perhaps you are like one of the groups that I wrote about in my previous blog, where you don't have the younger Facebook generation engaged in your attendance. And if this is the case with your attendance, then you have far bigger problems than being concerned about having your General Session Stage overrun by mutinious attendees.
Email me by clicking here for some tips on how to navigate through the maze and how to manage Web 2.0 for your organization.
