Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview of Mark Zuckerburg at SXSWi offers a fascinating insight into the impact of real-time social media conversation - and the perils for those who attempt to engage with an audience who are deeply entrenched in this world, without fully comprehending how that world works.

For those who haven’t seen this dissected in minute detail elsewhere - or watched it here - the root of the problem was that Lacy gave a long and rambling interview, from a very business-focused perspective which was totally out of sync with the expectations of her audience - a room full of developers, designers, techies and geeks who wanted to hear about the API, platform and how Facebook was going to develop going forward. The interview went from bad to worse, as Lacy meandered around recounting anecdotal stories about her subject rather than actually interviewing him, leading Zuckerberg to retort “You have to ask questions!”.

This didn’t just lead to heckling (although there was plenty of that as well) - as the interview progressed, the increasingly hostile audience were twittering their rising discontent about its conduct (and the interviewer), with their live micro-blogging offering a clear and decisive real-time response to how the session was going down.

As Jeff Jarvis points out far more astutely, the simple fact was that she wasn’t listening. The world of social conversation offers journalists, speakers - and brands - the opportunity to research what an audience wants, and to assess how they’re doing. A week prior to the keynote, Lacy could have blogged to ask SXSWers what they would like to see discussed with Zuckerberg. Even once things started going downhill, she could have opened up the discussion to the floor to ask them what they wanted to know there and then.

Now, by way of excuse, this may be the fault of the conference organisers rather than Lacy herself, as it appears her brief was to focus in a specifically business-centric direction, and not to take audience questions, since there was a separate Facebook developer-centric event for this purpose.

But what was clear was that the audience at SXSW are savvy digerati who are used to publishing their thoughts and views via blogs, Twitter, Meebo, Facebook and so on. They’re active prosumers who are used to having their say and weren’t content to passively listen to the conversation taking place on the stage - they expect to partake actively in both online and offline conversations. On the one hand this is nothing new - anyone who’s ever presented to an audience will know that interaction is the key to getting people engaged and involved, yet on the other hand I think the growth of active participation in social media and personal publishing tools will mean that active participation will come to be expected as standard.

Equally, this demonstration of how badly wrong things can go when you simply don’t listen to your audience should serve as a salutory lesson for brands/agencies about the perils of ignoring what your consumers are saying about you, and of failing to ask them what they think and what they want. If the customer is king, shouldn’t they be involved in the conversations right from the very start?

See also (amongst others):

Wired | Scoble | All Just Words