Lessons from Sarah Lacy's Mark Zuckerberg Interview Fiasco

Or, How NOT to Lose Your Audience (or Your Cool)!

In a Sunday interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sarah Lacy struggled to maintain, and ultimately lost, any semblance of control. Her attempts at a conversation-based, rather than question-based, interview downright backfired.

What some have called a "battle" between Lacy and the audience began when Lacy repeatedly interrupted the young Facebook pioneer. When at one point Lacy became confused as to how much time was left in the interview, the seemingly annoyed Zuckerberg joked, "Did you run out of questions?" The interview went downhill from there.

Sarah Lacy's main problem during the interview was her attempt to make it seem like she and Zuckerberg were closer friends than they were, if they were even friends to begin with. The audience, and Zuckerberg, seemed annoyed when Lacy began telling innumerous tales of her encounters with the Facebook CEO. Not infrequently she was charged by both the audience and her interviewee to ask an actual question.

Another issue for Lacy was her frequent interruptions of Zuckerberg. According to Daniel Terdiman, who reported on his first-person experience at the interview session, Zuckerberg became annoyed when Lacy repeatedly cut him off during questioning. At one point Lacy seemed to notice and stated, "I kind of cut you off. You kind of had this hurt look, like, 'I was talking.'" This statement was met with more angry remarks from the audience.

This brings up the third act of Lacy's trifecta disaster: her battle with the audience. As the audience became more and more displeased with Lacy's interviewing techniques and stage-presence, they became less and less orderly. At one point an audience member shouted out, "Try asking something interesting." At other points they called for Lacy to turn the microphone over to the audience so that they could ask the questions. Even Zuckerberg petitioned for Lacy to ask him some more actual questions. Rather than ignoring the audience's ragings-which, admittedly, would have been hard to do-Lacy tried to argue back.

"Try doing what I do for a living," she said. "It's not easy."