Twitter and TED's Ten Million X Prize

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For those who follow this space, you will have noticed more than its share of posts about the trials and tribulations of a certain British oil company.

The significance of this story first struck me on April 27, a week after the explosion of Deepwater Horizon. I wrote:

"Today I'm keeping an eye on a developing story in the Gulf of Mexico. This is not your run-of-the-mill oil spill. It's an environmental disaster that may very well rival Exxon Valdez."

This news event earned its legs by virtue of its many visceral dimensions, the futility in finding a solution, and the incessant media dissection of the decisions the spill's corporate and government "owners" have made along the way.

My musings on the topic have not resided solely on this blog. I've used a real-time micro-blogging platform to tweet and re-tweet PR-related gulf news. (Does anyone still call Twitter a "microblogging platform?")

On May 9, I caught a tweet from HuffPost CEO Eric Hippeau (for whom I once toiled as part of the AOR for Ziff-Davis Publishing). It read:

@erichippeau We badly need the Red Adair of offshore oil drilling to emerge and fix BP's mess

I followed up with my own tweet, and included Wired's Jeff Howe (@crowdsourcing) who's credited with coining the term "crowdsourcing," and subsequently penned a book about it.

@peterhimler @crowdsourcing, isn't there a way to crowd-source a fix for "BP's mess?" @erichippeau

Howe tweeted back moments later:

@Crowdsourcing Yep. Make an X-Prize of it. RT @PeterHimler Isn't there a way to crowd-source a fix for BP's mess?

Six weeks later, Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal ran with this piece:

"Is Establishing An "X-Prize" The Key To Fixing The BP Oil Leak?"

Today, we learn from Case Foundation's chairman Steve Case who attended the TEDxOilSpill conference along with " some of our nation's greatest thinkers...to help solve some of the most pressing issues related to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:"

@stevecase At #TEDxOilSpill, @XPrize announces $10 million challenge to clean up the #oilspill (via RT @brainpicker)

Is there evidence that these early tweets led to today's news from Washington DC? No. Still, maybe The Business Insider follows Jeff Howe, and the Case Foundation and TED Conference follow either or both. However it happened, it's just cool to see how good ideas on Twitter could have the capacity to catch fire and morph into something real and positive.

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views features the always edgy Michael Wolff, the always cutting-edgy Robert Scoble, Conde Nast's wired consumer marketing prexy, Yahoo on the Cote D'Azur, Omnicom's Porter Novelli on women and social media, and the great American uniter -- soccer.


Newser's Newsmaker-in-Chief on News Corp's Newsmaker-in-Chief

No stranger to these pages, Newser's, Vanity Fair's, and Murdochian bio-ist's Michael Wolff waxes on the man with whom he'll forever be associated for my pal Peter Hopkins' team at BigThink:




Where in the World is Robert Scoble?

The prolific Robert Scoble updates Beet.TV on his latest channels, four years after making his mark as Microsoft's original geek blogger. Here's his take on Klout, just off the social media ranking site's promotional tie-up with Virgin America.




Wired for Success

Conde Nast's consumer marketing chief Bob Sauerberg on the success (90,000 downloads and counting) of the Wired app for the iPad (via paidContent).




A La Plage

ClickZ's Zach Rodgers catches up with Yahoo!'s CMO Elisa Steele on the beach au Cote D'Azur for the company's "beach brand"-sculpting event.




"Facebook and Twitter are Chick Magnets"

Omnicom's Porter Novelli looks at social media and the demographic that uses it most: women.




Republicans, Democrats, Independents and Even Teabaggers United



(And you thought Americans didn't like soccer?)

Fateful and Fatal Interviews

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Who said mainstream media doesn't matter? The PR team at Rolling Stone is working overtime to publicize its latest celebrity scribe Michael Hastings, the writer that Gen. McChrystal took along for an ill-advised tour of duty, which may be the last tour for the loose-lipped former Special Ops chief. Even Hastings scratched his head at the naivete of this PR decision:

"It was a sort of natural kind of recklessness that General McChrystal had, which has been with him through his entire career, as I understand it. And inviting me in, was a obviously a risk, as it always is when you invite a journalist in."

As the story gained online virality, via Politico as a PDF file, we learned that the General had his own PR advisor who cut his teeth at the industry trade publication O'Dwyers. Is this not like having an Ad Age reporter manage your company's advertising strategy?

Working with journalists is not rocket science. You strive to have your client's point of view manifest in a story, while helping the journalist obtain what he or she set out to report. It entails a thorough look into a reporter's body of work and a good understanding of the particular outlet's editorial DNA.

This vital exercise alone should have given Gen. McChrystal's PR consigliere pause. It didn't. Perhaps they had visions of John McCain's slew of appearances on The Daily Show?

Many publicists, especially those dealing with "celebrities," proclaim success once the interview logistics are locked in, i.e., the coffee arrived on time. What many fail to realize is that this is the least consequential part of the journalist-PR equation. I mean, how difficult was it to convince Rolling Stone to do this interview, or more likely, to agree to a request by the magazine to profile the man leading the war in Afghanistan?

Once the booking is made, the real work begins. Most media "trainers" focus on preparing the newsmaker with delivery methods and messages. Few have had any contact with the journalist, which often poses a disadvantage. It is the advance work with the reporter that can help ensure a successful engagement.

On the client side, this advance work can help one peg (and prepare for) the reporter's questions. From the reporter's perspective, your client can better deliver on your "promise" to the reporter, hopefully resulting in a mutually beneficial editorial conclusion.

If the pre-interview prep -- on both sides of the equation -- is not adequately or properly handled, the results can be catastrophic. Mediaite's TV editor Steve Krakauer cleverly listed five "Career-Threatening Profiles Or Interviews – And Their Results:"

• Eric Massa vs. Glenn Beck

• David Paterson vs. New York Times

• Helen Thomas vs. Rabbi David Nesenoff

• John Mayer vs. Playboy

• Sarah Palin vs. Katie Couric

The annals of PR are filled with examples of unprepared or hubristic newsmakers whose careers caved at the hands of an enterprising journalist. But this is America in the 21st digital century, and audiences are fickle and forgetful.

Did Katie break or make Sarah Palin? Did Tom Cruise's meltdown on Oprah's couch cause irreparable damage? What about Kate Moss's mug shot, I mean drug shot on the cover of that British tabloid?

In our 24/7 whirlwind real-time (and thus forgiving) media culture, notorious behavior can often (and sadly) have an unforeseen career-positive effect. Right, Lady Gaga fans? Eliot Spitzer in prime time?

Brand WPP

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Adweek reports today that a team from WPP has landed creative duties for Mazda North America, besting three esteemed ad agencies including "Omnicom Group's DDB in Los Angeles (with sister shop Organic), MDC Partners' Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami and Boulder, Colo. and the incumbent, independent Doner in Southfield, Mich."

In all honesty, I was not surprised to read the news in Adweek, one of the main advertising trade outlets that prizes above all else breaking agency news of client wins and losses. What did surprise me was the reported name of the winner - a non-specific "team" of agencies from the "WPP Group" - the ad/marketing/PR holding company under whose aegis some of the most venerable ad agency brands reside, e.g, Ogilvy, Y&R, JWT, Grey...

This story brought back a couple of memories. The first involved our PR work to open Mazda's Flat Rock plant, which, in 1987, was the first Japanese automotive manufacturing facility in the Detroit area. It was not unusual for our agency (H&K) to be tapped by our WPP sister ad agency (JWT) to handle PR chores for its clients, eg, Mazda, Kodak...

For Mazda, every milestone -- from the initial announcement to the groundbreaking ceremony to the grand opening wherein the first cars rolled off the assembly line -- were deemed "home runs" in PR parlance. This was based on the extraordinary local/national TV news pick-up of the footage we shot, edited, and fed same-day via satellite (at a time when privately-produced video wasn't viewed -- by local news directors -- with such disdain).

The second memorable moment occurred years later at a quarterly meeting of WPP's NY-based communications execs, dubbed "The Tribe." For this particular meeting, WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell (pictured) joined our group for an informal chat.

I remember him saying that as a brand, WPP had no intrinsic (monetizable?) value. Rather, the value lied in the myriad brand names that fall under the WPP umbrella -- brands that represent every marketing, media and research discipline known to man.

Via a follow-up note, I had the chutzpah to question Sir Martin's premise by saying that the WPP name does actually have intrinsic brand value -- to the investment community. He wrote me back almost right away, as he's known to do, and agreed, which brings me back to today's Adweek story and these questions.

• Which has more clout: the WPP brand with client-side marketing decisionmakers, or WPP (Nasdaq: WPPGY) with the street?
• And which WPP agency, or combination thereof, actually landed Mazda North America's creative duties?

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition has David Kirkpatrick on his Facebook Effect and Techonomy, the iPad's latest accessory, a New York Congressman's opinion of BP's spokespersons, Scoble's next big thing in location-based companies, and Stephen Colbert's PR-Mageddon.

Zuckerberg: Grow First, Monetize Later

The Business Insider's Nich Carlson was one of the many interviews that Facebook Effect author and Techonomy co-founder David Kirkpatrick granted to promote his new book. In it, Kirkpatrick postulates that Zuckerberg's refusal to acquiesce to his colleagues' demands to monetize early helped fuel Facebook's extraordinary growth.




Techonomy

I also had planned to talk with Mr. Kirkpatrick on his new venture, Techonomy, which he formed with two former tech-beat colleagues from Fortune magazine, but found this video clip instead:




iPad meets Velcro

With two million+ iPads now in the hands of consumers and new iPad apps sprouting as fast as one can say oil gusher in the Gulf, we'll soon see a flurry of iPad accessories. Here's one that marries the newest classic with one of the older ones.

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Location Location Location

Scoble says forget "overhyped" location companies FourSquare, Gowalla and Whrrl, watch our for Goby.com and DealMap. Here's his take on the latter:




Blimey PR People

Not one to mince words, here's how New York Congressman Anthony Weiner views what emanates from the mouths of BP's "British-accented" spokespersons:




PR-Mageddon

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert on BP's PR-Mageddon (via ODwyerPR)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - P.R.-mageddon
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

SEO RIP?

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As mentioned in a previous post, I had a chance to hear the insightful and entertainingly profane Gary Vaynerchuk wax poetic on the open stage at the recent Internet Week confab here in NYC. @GaryVee said something that got me a thinking.

In essence, he proclaimed the death of search engine optimization (SEO) as a marketing discipline for driving business:

"...the days of gaming Google to garner one's ranking in the search engine's organic results are numbered. He said that he'll be getting his restaurant recommendations, not from search, but from his '17 most trusted friends' in his social channels."

Consider this:

• Facebook has more than 400 million active users; 50% of its active users log on to Facebook in any given day; An average user has 130 friends.

• Twitter has close to 106 million, with 300,000 new users signing up every day, and 180M unique visitors every month.

• Foursquare had almost 1.6 million users and is growing fast.

With these numbers and the inherent trust users assign to the recommendations of their expanding circle of "friends" residing in these and other social channels, what will become of an entire industry of SEO specialists fixated on Google's always-changing algorithm?

Fortuitously, I had a chance to share Gary Vee's vision of a world less reliant on Google search for trusted recs with the one person who most assuredly would have an opinion.

Here is an audio clip (RT 7:36) of my exchange with the prolific Jeff Jarvis, associate professor at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism, author of What Would Google Do?, co-host of This Week in Google, and BuzzMachine blogger who singlehandedly forced a massive cultural shift at Dell after his series of Dell Hell rants.

So, is the SEO industry and the gaming of Google by marketers on the outs? Jarvis concludes with this:

"Look at companies like Demand Media. They are producing millions of pieces of content that are designed for exploiting SEO and Google. Google is looking for more signals of originality and quality according to Matt Cutts...The more that Google gets better signals and better stuff, the better the search results are for each of us. So the fact that SEO starts to die I think is a very good sign for Google, the opposite of what Gary says. I rarely disagree with Gary and I shop at his store...great wine and a great guy, but I think he's wrong about this one."

With that said, my pal Lee Odden, one of the best SEO pros in the business, remains bullish about the prospects for his chosen discipline. Here's his post on the subject. And here's an excerpt from his comment below:

"While the 400 million+ FB users, 100 million+ Tweeple and over 1 1/2 million Foursquare users is impressive, consider this: Google web sites handle over 88 BILLION queries per month.

With all the content being created, crawled and indexed from web sites, social channels and various media, does anyone really think the usefulness of sorting through all that content could be accomplished through recommendations alone? That's a sound bite, not wisdom."

A Pool Approach to Coverage

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"Should the volatility of a company’s stock price determine how public information on an environmental disaster be delivered to the public?"

This is the crux of the issue that "The Media Equation's" David Carr raises in his always must-read column today "A Disaster, Privately Managed." In essence, the command-and-control approach taken by BP and its PR advisors cleverly exploits the SEC's decade-old fair disclosure regulations in an effort to minimize the negative material (and reputational) fallout that graphically unsettling images from the Gulf may have on the company.

This is how BP's media person explained the company's decision to limit media access to an increasingly despoiled Gulf of Mexico:

“Given recent volatility in BP share price, I’m told that information related to top kill is now considered stock-market sensitive, which means it has to be managed under disclosure rules for the London and N.Y. stock exchanges,” the BP media official said in an e-mail message. “In a nutshell, that means all investors must be provided information on an equal basis. That precludes me from sending you updates as various aspects of the operation unfold.”

Yes. It's true that a publicly traded company is required to make stock-sensitive information available to all parties concurrently. And yes, selective disclosure may very violate these regulations.

But should we believe that BP's decision to limit media access or withhold vital information was made for fear of running afoul of those who govern the New York or London Stock Exchanges? Wouldn't the real-time dissemination of information mitigate any cause for regulatory concern especially as more and more companies have the capacity to transform themselves into media companies?

I'll always remember another crisis in which I was involved that also invoked the name of our neighbor to the south. Specifically, news organization had reported that a massive earthquake in Mexico had all but decimated the entire country. In reality, the damage was limited.

Of course, these histrionic headlines did not sit well with our client the Mexican Ministry of Tourism. Frustrated by the overly dramatic coverage, it decided to dispatch its own TV crews in helicopters to the affected areas. We then fed via satellite that fresh, and we believe more accurate footage to the news departments of the 700+ U.S. broadcast stations for airing, as they saw fit, on their evening newscasts. We also booked the cabinet-level head of tourism for an interview on NBC "Today" accompanied by that footage.

Nowadays, companies in crisis need not have to rely on the editorial benevolence of news organizations to carry their points-of-view. The means exist to take the D-T-C route by creating and syndicating content through their own channels. The spill cam notwithstanding, what other information, graphics, images and video could BP create and make available to properly (and hopefully more accurately) frame the reality on the ground?

I was encouraged to see Dachis Group's recommendation -- "Would being more social help BP?" -- that the company create a social tab to its website featuring:

• A wiki to provide information on how volunteers should properly deal with affected wildlife.
• A community to help would-be volunteers organize and mobilize.
• A community for those who have filed claims to help others through the process (and for BP to learn ways to make the process easier).
• An online directory of people to register their boats and professional services
• A forum to crowdsource ideas to fix the problem.

As for the question of limiting journalist access, if unfettered media access poses logistical issues -- especially when the number of bona fide journalists can stretch into the thousands -- perhaps a pool approach (excuse the term) is a workable alternative?

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views features John Battelle, Quitting Facebook, iPhone 4 spot, Pitch Engine, SalesForce.com on cloud computing, NPR spoof of AllThingsD, and Gilt Groupe.

John Battelle

Federated Media's founder and CEO says that his company has evolved from being a media buying firm for blogs to a "media company" which creates innovative media solutions for clients. (via Beet.TV)

On Quitting Facebook

In the aftermath of the failed movement to get folks to quit Facebook (registration continued on its upward trend), this video emerged via Brandon Prebynski:




First iPhone 4 spot

Satchmo gives the IPhone 4 a proper send off. Skype anyone?




Viral Video Wannabe

P̶i̶t̶c̶h̶ ̶E̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶ Office Space's attempt at (self-serving) humor. Not all that humorous, but you've got to give J̶a̶s̶o̶n̶ ̶&̶ ̶c̶o̶.̶ credit for trying.




Cloud Computing explained via salesforce.com




NPR's spoofy take on AllThingsD

NPR chief Vivian Schiller goes with the flow in a video spoof of AllThingsD .

“10 Web Content Urban Legends”

Featuring College Humor co-founder Ricky Van Veen at the inaugural Mashable Media Summit during Internet Week NY. (via @PKafka from Mashable)

How Gilt was Built

If you were wondering how the invitation-only luxury e-commerce site Gilt Groupe grew, here's a piece (via WSJ) with its founder Alexis Maybank.

Internet Week NY: A Digital Feast

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What a week, this week in New York! For those of you off the grid (or in South Africa for the World Cup), this week is Internet Week in the Big Apple. If you thought Social Media Week overflowed with pundits and pontificators ushering in a new digital world order, #IWNY puts Social Media Week to shame.

To give you a sense of #IWNY's real-time impact, I don't remember #SMWNY crashing Twitter. But sure enough, Internet Week's rapacious participants have apparently incapacitated Twitter for much of the week (though my BB Twitter app seems unaffected).

In addition to its full sked of events, other influential organizations in the digital media space chose this week to hold their NY confabs. Among them:

-- Mashable Media Summit. Watch it live and taped here.

-- John Battelle's CM Summit

-- IAB's Innovations Days @ Internet Week

And if you think we've reached a saturation point, think again. All three premium-priced events listed above sold out!

On Monday evening,. I had the Fortune of attending the launch party for David Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect," hosted by MDC-Partners at Michael's. Apparently, David segued that same night from Michael's to Cipriani for a second book party in his honor (if you believe Jon Fine).

The next day I found myself at Internet Week's headquarters where I ran into Social Media Club co-founder Howard Greenstein to whom I expressed my amazement at the number of high quality events and speakers descending upon our city. He told me that his friends in San Francisco were befuddled by the notion of an Internet Week, and that Internet Week is every week in the Bay area. I thought to myself, "probably not for long" (if you believe CNN).

I was able to catch the inimitable Gary Vaynerchuk (@GaryVee) who took the open stage at #IWNY HQ to wax extemporaneously, poetically (and profanely) on why Google's days our numbers.

I didn't record exactly what he said, but in essence, he proclaimed that the days of gaming Google to garner one's ranking in the search engine's organic results are numbered. He said that he'll be getting his restaurant recommendations, not from search, but from his "17 most trusted friends" in his social channels.

I then sauntered over to the IAB confab in an adjacent auditorium where I sat in on a panel called "To GRP Or Not To GRP: The Never Ending Measurement Conundrum"

IAB described the session as follows:

The GRP debate has been raging as long as online video has been a reality. While a true fix is still potentially a few years down the road, the current fever-pitch pace of screen convergence seems to demand a workaround today. If you can’t compare apples to apples, is it better to at least compare apples to...pears? Or does this just create more obstacles on the road to real metrics?

The session featured (pictured l. to r.):

-- Dean Donaldson, Director, Digital Experience, Eyeblaster

-- David Smith, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Mediasmith

-- Beth Uyenco, Global Research Director, Microsoft Advertising

-- Matt Wasserlauf, Chief Executive Officer, BBE

-- Moderator: Joe Mandese, Editor-in-Chief, MediaPost

I was most enamored with the remarks by Eyeblaster's Dean Donaldson who described a world (in five years' time) where Internet-delivered video - via big screens and small - will once and for all allow marketers to interactively engage the exact demographic they seek (with no "waste"). He personally sounded relieved that finally, he wouldn't have to sit through those come-ons for feminine hygiene products.

All in all, this was a good investment of time (and it's only Wednesday). I'm looking forward to auditing ThinkSocial's Toby Daniels' the#promise tomorrow.



Photos: Peter Himler (Canon PowerShot SX20 IS)

BP's New Campaign: Just Hot Air?

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For PR pundits everywhere, especially those with outlets to spread their musings, BP is the gift that keeps on giving. This blogger has written three posts on the beleaguered company thus far, and with every new day, a potentially bloggable wrinkle emerges around company's efforts to manage this most unnatural disaster, and its own reputation.

I caught the latest PR meme late last week when "The NewsHour's" Gwen Ifill asked David Brooks and Mark Shields to opine on the advisability of BP CEO Tony Hayward appearing in expensive TV commercials. The spots, designed to reassure the public about BP's commitment to making good on cleaning up its mess, appear more self-serving than selfless. Brooks and Shields were in rare agreement that this campaign likely did not advance the company's interests.

Typically, companies resort to paid TV "advertorials" such as these when its efforts to impart their POVs via "free" or "earned" media fall short, or as is the case with BP, beset by uncontrolled gaffes that muddy true intentions. The Wall Street Journal's ad reporter Suzanne Vranica today further anointed the story meme when she correctly asks whether this campaign is effective. Her piece "BP Rolling Out New Ads Aimed at Repairing Image" opens as follows:

"Undeterred by criticism of a new TV commercial featuring its leader, BP PLC is pressing ahead with a major ad campaign—in an effort to rescue its badly damaged image—as torrents of oil continue to spew into the Gulf of Mexico."

Crisis managers should ask themselves whether this particular communications tactic can work in an ongoing crisis situation. Apparently not, if you believe some of the initial research measuring reaction:

"Early indications suggest the ad isn't hitting the mark with consumers and crisis experts. 'The ad failed to resonate in a meaningful way,' said Ju Young Lee, co-founder and chief scientist of Ace Metrix, a Los Angeles research firm that polled consumers on their reaction to it. 'In a nut shell,' she added, 'what consumers are saying is that they have been waiting for BP to say something and, after hearing it, they say they didn't learn anything new.'"

In my opinion, it's not the fact that BP has to resort to paid advertising to reassure a doubting public of its good intentions. (This tack has proven efective in other crises.) It's simply that the news media, and the public they inform, could care less about BP's reputation right now. It's what BP has demonstrably done and is doing to repair the economic and environmental damage it has wrought. This alone should placate many of the naysayers. One whiff of spin will produce the opposite effect -- as we're now seeing.

I wonder if this campaign would have produced the same visceral reaction had the spots been posted on the BP website (and YouTube) as opposed to being expensively purchased on TV? More here.

Friday's Video Views

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This week's edition of Video Views explores the Brains behind Pandora, visits with IdeaLabs' Bill Gross, examines Athletes on Social Media, sneaks into AOL's D8 after-party w/ Walt & Kara, and makes you think with The RSA.

The Brains Behind Pandora (via @time).

How the recommendation engine behind Pandora Radio — using the Music Genome Project — figures out what you like to hear:




The World According to Gross

The intrepid Steve Rubel grabs some video with IdeaLab's legendary Bill Gross who waxes on why his two-month-old Tweet-up ("AdSense for Tweets") makes sense for marketers.




Athletes on Social Media (via 5Across on MediaShift)




KatieCam

AOL Nightcap gathering following Steve Jobs' tete-a-tete with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Katherine Boehret brings her KatieCam to the AOL-sponsored D8 after-party featuring singer Natasha Bedingfield.




Carrot & Stick

The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress for over 250 years. This is a very cool tutorial using progressive animated drawings to explain what really motivates people.

Primetime Meltdown

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The value to a company of a smart, articulate and engaging CEO cannot be underestimated. Nowhere is this PR fact-of-life more apparent than during a live TV or video-streamed media interview.

I'll always remember sitting alongside one of the best in the business -- Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy. We were in the green room of NBC "Today" on the morning following his and Bill Gates' testimony before Congress on why Microsoft is and isn't, respectively, a monopoly.

While Sun wasn't my day-to-day client, I thought I'd take my 20 minutes with Mr. McNealy to talk through some of his talking points. Without skipping a beat, he proceeded to school me on his intentions on network TV that morning:

"Imagine owning the alphabet and having the ability to add or remove letters at your discretion. This is Microsoft."

I decided that it would be best for me to say nothing more.

There is a growing body of research correlating a CEO's reputation with that of his or her company. The work of Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, my friend and former B-M colleague who now toils at Weber-Shandwick, would be a good place to start for getting your arms around this most consequential dynamic (as we'll learn below).

I wonder how Leslie would interpret Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's literal meltdown on stage late yesterday at the D8 Conference with AllThingsD's acerbic tech scribes Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg.

The beads-of-sweat Nixonian performance of the already beleaguered Mr. Zuckerberg did little to advance the fortunes of his six-year-old company to which a half-a-billion+ people entrust their virtual lives. In fact, judging from the visceral reaction, this interview probably set it considerably back.

The clever folks at The Business Insider decided to feature a "best-of" compendium of real-time tweets by a handful of movers & shakers from the digital punditry. The piece, titled "Well done, Mark-- you survived!" unfolded more or less as follows:

@PKafka Zuck is orating. #D8

@alansmurray First interview of a CEO wearing a hood. #D8

@johnbattelle #d8 zuck we are not trying to make all info shareable that is false

@Jason Zuckeberg at WSJ D Conference "privacy is important...we think about it a lot." Powersful stuff, clearly someone went to media training.

@Jason Zuckerberg: "our privacy settings are too complex." he is not apologetic at all -- really zero empathy.

@johnbattelle d8 zuck really isn't answer walts quest on why FB forced interests into public pages

@Jason Zuckberg is rambling. He is talking like a politician.

@dannysullivan not at #d8, but want kara/walt to say "I want the truth," and zuck to burst out "you can't handle the truth"...

@sacca Zuckerberg couldn't look more uncomfortable on stage. I almost feel bad for him.

@phkeane Zuckerberg is very uncomfortable. He is literally sweating bullets #d8

@sharonwaxman facebook ceo mark zuckerberg incredibly nervous, sweating, stammering...

@jlouderb Zuckeberg talking point: "to share and stay connected with the people around them and their friends." He said it like 99 times. #d8

@jlouderb Walt and Kara keep trying, but zuckerberg keeps dodging the "personal control of privacy" question. Z and FB are not shining here.

@dangillmor Never thought I'd feel much sympathy for Zuckerberg, an amazing talent but utterly unprepared for transparency his power now demands.

@Jason Wow...Zuckerberg is imploding on stage. Sweating, babbling...not answering basic questions...

@Jason Zuckerberg fireside chat at WSJ D is an unprecedented disaster -- he won't give a straight answer, babbling, sweating...

and

@shelisrael Open letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Step down.

@shelisrael After his "performance" at D8, I don't see how anyone could suggest otherwise. FB is quickly becoming the BP of social media.

Personally I can't explain how the decision was made to offer up the usually confident, but apparently unprepared Mark Zuckerberg to two of the more cantankerously influential tech scribes working today. After running scores of media training sessions, I've learned that not every "trainee" can or should be deemed ready for prime time. Didn't one of his PR consiglieres have the temerity to share this with the 26-year-old Mr. Zuckerberg? And why did he have to do this particular interview, anyway? Hasn't he been exposed enough?

Full interview here:




Top photo credit: Ina Fried/CNET