Denise Shiffman’s Engage Daily Blog

Last week at SXSWi, I watched Sarah Lacy, a BusinessWeek columnist, interview Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO. This was positioned as a keynote presentation. Not surprisingly, the audience of creatives, Web developers and designers, social network managers, and so on expected a little meat in the talk. They would have liked a few details such as new features planned, or evolution of the company vision or strategy. Something they didn’t already know or read on the Web.

Somehow Sarah and Mark didn’t know this. They were having a little fireside chat with their insider comments and anecdotes of no relevance to anyone there. And although this post really isn’t about picking on Sarah and the fact that she had completely ignored who her audience was and what they came to hear, I can’t help but note many of us make the same mistake. Sarah was completely focused on herself — and often corporate marketing departments are too internally focused, too.

Well, you won’t be surprised, Sarah and Mark were pretty much booed off the stage.

We can’t always be perfectly prepared for each presentation or each marketing program. Sometimes we miss the mark. The key is not to get caught up in the mistake — or worse — continue making the mistake. As soon as you have a sense it’s not going well, adjust. Ask your audience what isn’t working and what they’d like to hear or receive.

We have the tools now to open a dialogue.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 6:24 am and is filed under Marketing fundamentals, News and views, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.