Found your site through googling for social media metrics. Was wondering about the notes on ‘teen marketing’. Will you guys be doing a write up on that soon? Would be great if you’re sharing the knowledge.

Cheers

Nai

My point was simply that this recurring theme of audience dissatisfaction should not be ignored. I never meant to condone behavior such as coughing in unison — that is rude and silly. I agree that pushback must be civil, and mostly it was.

The “Are Logos Irrelevant?” panel, for example, was a model of appropriate pushback: audience members lined up at the mike and presented *brief* and *logical* evidence that the panelists had failed to make the case for their provocative premise. In the “Design Eye” panel, there was very little audible pushback (in fact one Q&A participant who tried to stir things up was promptly hushed by the rest of the room) — but the sudden disappointment during the “reveal” was like a blanket descending on the room, and it threw off the presenters who were expecting whoops of applause. Herasimchuk’s response was not to a belligerent audience member but to someone who had waited in line to ask the perfectly reasonable question of how their navigation-challenged sample pages could be integrated into the larger site.

Yes, conference speakers can be boring. There were some of those at SXSW, too, and people walked out on them quietly. But when speakers are ill-prepared, arrogant, or deceptive, the question is no longer how to provide avenues for feedback, but how to make sure that people do not become angry at the perceived theft of their time and money.