The Hartsock Agency

I like Jeff Jarvis’ take on Sarah Lacy’s interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW.

Here is one clip of the interview featured on YouTube .

There are several things to learn from this particular interview and how it went from both journalist and media/pr perspective.

While Sarah is actually a good journalist and writer and no doubt has talent, she failed in this interview because she was more concerned with seeming cool and hip than smart, serious and engaging. People come to SXSW to learn new things, not see somebody being interviewed by a journalist who spends a lot of the time playing with her hair and touting her book being released in May.

Sarah was too casual in her interviewing style and she lost control of the interview. She engaged the audience and then belittled the audience at the same time. She evoked audience comment from the stage which enabled them to feel as though they had an opportunity to rate the interview live.

This is somewhat similar to a comedian letting a heckler take the mike. There are always going to be some folks in any audience who are ready to pounce (Not POWNCE) and as an interviewer you have to respect them but you also have to manage them.

The bigger point is for someone who is writing a column for Business Week and has made it despite all odds to this level of work, there’s no time in live interviews for hair-twisting or spending a considerable amount of time asking a CEO about notebooks they write their ideas in and then debating whether they actually burn them or not.

I’m curious to know if Sarah found time to ask Mark about Bill Gates leaving Facebook and moving to LinkedIn or whether Facebook is truly making a return for all those ad dollars companies are spending on it.

While Mark might benefit from some interview or media training it’s not really his job in interviews to move the interview along or make sure the audience is engaged and getting what they need.

It’s the interviewer’s job. From the three years I was the Managing Editor of a Texas arts and entertainment magazine in Austin, the very best lesson I learned was how to be both an engaged listener and an engaged interviewer. Celebrity interviews are in some ways the toughest to do because they are already very media-trained and prepped by publicists not to answer questions.

When I interviewed folks like Frances McDormand, Debra Winger, Jimmy Kimmel, Ben Stein (one of my faves) I went into the interview determined to get something new and meaningful. Ben Stein gave me his secret to making a living as a writer (thank you Ben Stein – to this day), and Frances McDormand was a new mom so I found a way to connect with her on that level and the interview was fantastically revealing. (It helped that I was a new Mom too and Moms are always ready to talk about being a Mom.)

These skills served me well when I started writing online and managed the Ibizinterviews.com site (now gone) and interviewed all the early Net folks that were quite literally changing the way we would all do business and live.

In the mid 90′s, one of my favorite interviews was with Nelson Carbonell who was at the time CEO of Cysive and ended up telling me how he started the company in his basement with chairs purchased from Wal-Mart.

Or Jon Nordmark, CEO of eBags.com who successfully made it through the dot-com burst intact and said during our interview that luggage was sexy. (It is if you get it from eBags!)

In the late 90′s, I interviewed the CTO of Google – Craig Silverstein about Google and ended up getting him to talk about Star Trek and how it related to the Google algorithms. I knew he was a Star Trek fan and that helped move our interview into a real conversation. He’s still at Google today.

Oftentimes if you just do exhaustive research you can find a way to even help the most tech-centered folks have authentic conversations and illicit aha moments from them without berating them or belittling them.

The real key to being an adept interviewer is to help people tell their story even if they’re not comfortable with telling it. Mark was spending too much time in “company speak” but even that can be diffused if a reporter has really done background research and is able to pull the interviewee out of “company speak.” It’s a hard skill to learn, but it can be done.

There is also a lesson in all of this about how journalists often go into a story or interview with a set template or angle in mind. Sarah had a set angle she wanted to cover and did a poor job of stepping outside that angle. She seemed argumentative and that’s tough to handle when you’re the interviewee, espescially when you’re a tech guy.

I’m reminded of years ago how deft Sally Richards was and how much I learned from her in terms of getting tech guys to speak in real terms. Sally never sacrificed herself, or her intellectual acuity either. She succeeded because she had a great sense of humor, camaraderie and engagement with the Silicon Valley elite and it was never about “Sally”.

The Internet, the Web, Web 2.0 or Web 18.0 is still at the very base founded in technology and the brilliant minds moving us all along to a better place. It’s not The Actor’s Studio, it’s technology and if you’re a journalist it’s never about you. It’s about the news and how it will impact society as a whole.

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