Reputations in the New Social Order

This may not make any sense to you as the reader since you did not attend sxsw, but the account of the Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, interview at sxsw made news - via Twitter live during the interview and then later on Media Post's Social Media Insider. This is an example of how things can change instantly for a person or an organization via social media technology:

"I'm no more sure of what the Sarah Lacy/Twitter debacle means than I am about the Eliot Spitzer tweets, but let me take a crack at it. To recap, Sarah Lacy writes the ValleyGirl column for BusinessWeek, and was asked by the organizers of SXSW Interactive (an offshoot of the music festival in Austin), to interview Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday as part of the conference. My personal complaint is that somehow the interview ended up being as much about her, her book, her previous encounters with Zuckerberg, as it does being about him or Facebook.

The crowd agreed, but here's where the Zuckerberg/Lacy interview differs from the usual lousy conference Q&A. Those in attendance began to criticize her, in real-time, on Twitter, blogs and in the real world, bringing a brand new meaning to the term "mobisode," which used to mean a small, portable episode of a TV show.

Now, I'd argue that an experience like Lacy's fits the term better (although here the first syllable in "mobisode" should be pronounced as in the word "mob," not "mobile.") At one point, when Zuckerberg offered that maybe Lacy should ask questions, the crowd cheered for 30 seconds that seemed like five minutes, and somehow, between the Twitter postings, the news stories, the posting of the interview on YouTube, and so on, Sarah Lacy found herself in the middle of a Web 2.0 perfect storm -- which has continued to feed on social media's power. Now that's a mobisode! Though what I've seen of the interview certainly shouts "debacle," in another era it would've been quickly recounted and dismissed. Sarah Lacy may have committed many an interviewing faux pas on Sunday, but is this to be the punishment we can expect in the future for a particularly bad day at the office?"

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Also, a You Tube account.