My Embarrassing Scoble Powerpoint Incident in front of Hundreds of People
This is a true story. Shel Holtz, Jen McClure, Katie Paine, Joseph Thornley, Robert Scoble and others were witness.
Not sure why I’m telling the world this, I guess it’s in the spirit of transparency and kind of a way to deal with the embarrassment.
In my social media career, this is THE most embarrassing public moment I’ve had to date.
- There were hundreds of PR professionals at the Ragan PR conference in the crowd, including a video (we’ve got to get the video for this).
- We we’re at the Chicago PR Conference, and Robert is kicking off the entire conference with his Keynote speech.
- There are problems with the Powerpoint projector, it’s not calibrated to show all of Robert’s slides (you know the Hugh ones) and the words were getting cut off on the left and bottom.
- He asks me to get on stage and help him switch to ‘edit’ mode, so at least the entire slide will be seen through the projector. I stay on the podium on stage while Robert cruises through the crowd.
- As I mentioned before, the awareness of social media was very low, and many folks were not familiar with web tools, blog indexers, etc.
- During his speech Robert was referencing many of these tools, and he had to spell out the URLs, it was taking up time, so I decided to help by opening a new PPT preso and adding in the URLs. Big F’ing mistake.
- For some reason (and I swear I didn’t do it) the new presentation opens up and it pastes his last text he wrote. It said something about “…that’s BS and something about someone else’s name”. Whatever the content was, it looked like a private email, and it wasn’t appropriate for the presentation.
- Then the PC froze and I had no control over anything, omg.
- Aside from the PC freezing, I froze too, I was mortified.
- During this whole time, people started to snicker but Robert was facing the audience and couldn’t see what was going on.
- He turns around and says to me over the mic “what ARE you doing?”
- Jeremiah still mortified as his text was pasted in front of the whole audience.
- Jeremiah: “Control Alt Delete, Control Alt Delete, Control Alt Delete”.
- Finally, the laptop gave into my panic, and it returned to the presentation.
- I apologized quietly, and I could feel my face burning bright red, and I hide behind the podium.
- Fortunately, Robert isn’t a person to get mad about such things, and he lives his entire life in public, I found out later it was a blog comment he left on his public blog.
Lessons Learned
Lesson 1) Don’t try to help out, just sit there, next time I’ll pretend to be technically inept.
Lesson 2) Robert needs a new laptop.
Lesson 3) A little humility can go a long way.
The Crowd (just a partial shot)
Robert with his cursed-hexed-evil Laptop.
19 Comments so far
Leave a reply
Jeremy,
I think it’s cool you blogged this. Sorry I missed it (sounds kinda funny). But in any case you’ve defused any notion that you did something inappropriate or were making fun of the audience. Anyway, how cool are you to get invited up on stage by Scoble?
Debbie
Thanks, looking back it was kind of funny. Yes, I can always brag that I was on stage with Scoble on his keynote. Of course when they read what REALLY happened it will be fun for laughs.
Oh yes, and I think I got the nerve to blog about it as a way to cope, and also to explain to Robert…I never really told him my side of the story…whoopsies
Poor guy. This is definitely embarrassing.
We still love you (and I’m sure Robert does too)
Thanks for sharing. My weeks looks a whole lot better now!
I think that what I have learned is being able to say “I screwed up” and “I am sorry” are 2 phrases everyone in the world needs to learn to say. People respect you more. I can’t tell you that as I screw up, admitting to it has helped me.
As I moved more and more into marketing and less and less into technology - people in the marketing group would look to me for tech support when their sh** broke during presentations. At one point, I finally decided to sit there and let them call the support desk. That was very hard to do. But I agree with you about sitting there.
Just smile about it and I am sure when Shel sees you the next time, he won’t even remember!
Jeremiah,
Yep I was in the crowd. And I didn’t even notice this. I think probably the only people who did notice were the folks who weren’t actually paying attention to Robert in the first place. Cause he was in the audience and he was rocking.
Now, what would have been really embarrassing is if it were YOUR name in the text string!
Allen, your right…
“I screwed up”
“Am sorry”
Is how I’ve succesfully navigated the one year of my marriage!
Heh. I would have done it to Scoble on purpose.
Shel
Heh, that would have been interesting.
ctrl-alt-delete? you mean scoble was not using a Mac?
Hahaha No Mac…
Don’t worry. You’ll look back in a couple of months (or sooner) and laugh.
I was in the crowd, and didn’t even notice it. In fact, once the presentation froze up, Robert was much more interesting, since he had to freelance a little with true thoughts instead of his canned presentation. PPT is too much of a crutch.
Jeremiah: Funny to hear this story now. I also did not notice this and was sitting with Joe Thornley. It was a good presentation regardless.
That said, I was surprised at how few hands went up when Robert quizzed folks on social media sites. Then again, that’s probably why they attended in the first place, right?
[…] Interesting Posts: Most embarrassing Favorite post most self punishing […]
[…] that’s bad? I’ve blogged about other embarrassing things I’ve done, such as screwing up Robert Scoble’s keynote in front of hundreds of PR professionals, a little humility goes a long way. Forgive me all, even web strategists screw up […]
[…] My Embarrassing Scoble Powerpoint Incident in front of Hundreds of People: After reading this my new colleague Lucy covered her mouth in astonishment for quite a while after reading this, nice. […]
hey this reminds me of a presentation disaster where my cue cards dropped on the floor after i decided smartly to write on both sides only to confuse myself. and i spent some time browsing thru it with my grp mates lookin at me in horror while the audience waits for me to continue.
but u know what? this is hell good of a lesson, and turns out to be a blessing. ive moved on to not ever use cue cards or scripts in my life, n became a so much better presenter.
Look on the bright side… it cld ve been worse! (:
Heh, pretty funny. I can relate as one who’s had to manage people’s presentations and work thru the tech problems when time stands still. Thanks for sharing that Jeremiah. Probably pretty cathartic.
Funny, since I moved to the mac platform a 1-1/2 years ago, such problems have been almost non-existant. I am an evangelist now… but that’s a conversation for a different post! lol.