After Sunday’s trainwreck/debacle/revolt at the Mark Zuckerberg SXSW keynote, the Facebook founder decided to engage in a “redo” conversation today at Pangaea during a Facebook developer meetup. I learned about this spur-of-the-moment event via Robert Scoble’s Twitter feed and instantly rushed to Pangaea in a cab.

Below is a short video I captured of Zuckerberg taking the stage. Today’s conversation was good for him, especially in light of yesterday’s bizarre keynote interview. He took open Q&A from the crowd and seemed to be more comfortable, in his element, and confident in what he was saying.

(Image by Brian Solis on Flickr)

Today during the Mark Zuckerberg keynote at SXSW, a compelling thing happened. Zuckerberg was interviewed by author Sarah Lacy, who scored zero popularity points with the crowd. While she was frequently interjecting personal antecdotes, plugs for her soon-to-be-released book, twirling her hair and overall conducting a bad interview, all sorts of chatter and criticism was happening among audience members via various back channels such as Twitter.

The silently-brewing revolt finally came to a head when Lacy mentioned the infamous Lesley Stahl interview a second time in response to Zuckerberg answering only with one-word responses, and Zuckerberg finally put her in her place by saying: “You have to ask questions.” A jubilant, overjoyed cheer erupted from us - an audience of thousands of angry monkeys who were jilted out of a decent keynote conversation. Lacy later commented that the crowd couldn’t possibly understand how hard her job was, which resulted in more boisterous jeers. By the end of the interview, her frustration with the revolt was evident.

Lacy: “Could somebody send me a message and tell me how I sucked so badly?”
Audience member, into the mic: “Give me your e-mail address.”

This backlash is just a microcosm of what happens every day within disruptive social mediums, whether it’s a blogger calling out bad customer service at Dell, or a Taco Bell patron posting a video of rats running around the kitchen on YouTube.

The tools are at our disposal, so be prepared for disruption and know how to respond.

UPDATE / 6:44 pm: Jesse from BitStrips sent this comic to me, which I love. It adds a little more context to the whole fiasco so I thought I’d post it.

Scrabulous is one of the more popular add-on applications inside Facebook with over 500,000 users per day. (Count me as one of them.) On January 11th, Hasbro/Mattel — makers of the original Scrabble board game — sent Facebook a cease-and-desist order, citing copyright infringement.

Facebook apps (Scrabulous included) are created by third-party developers on top of the social networking site’s open API. Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the Calcutta-based developers who created Scrabulous, are apparently also included in the cease-and-desist letter.

While the copyright infringement issue is certainly understandable, I’m inclined to think that Hasbro/Mattel is more upset that they aren’t profiting from the 500,000+ people who interact with their product every day. Here’s another example of how companies must adapt and adjust their revenue streams to work in tandem with social mediums, and quickly.

If I’m Hasbro/Mattel, I immediately hire the Agarwalla brothers, full-time or via consulting contract, and put them in charge of getting the entire brand portfolio (Battleship, Monopoly, Jenga, Stratego, Clue, etc.) built upon the Facebook API and Google’s OpenSocial movement. I’d use this as an opportunity to create communities around my products, turn my users into distributors, gather data via opt-in methods to learn more about my customers, sell ad space and ultimately promote brand loyalty.

I manage ad campaigns for more than one client inside Facebook, so I’ve used different credit cards to make the purchases. Yesterday, a client told me she was finding all sorts of strange charges on her card, and after digging into the issue, we discovered that Facebook had been billing her for ALL Lava Row client campaigns.

Not good.

During the setup process of Social Ads, Facebook gives you the option to use an existing credit card already associated with your account, or to enter new c.c. information. (Evidence below!) By entering new info at the exact point of purchase, you kind of assume the charges will go to that card, correct? Apparently not.

What’s odd is that Facebook allows you to associate multiple cards in your account settings (shown in the screen grab above), but I received this message from their customer support team:

Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a system set up that can bill more than one card per account at once. We sincerely apologize for the confusion. If you wish to switch credit cards, you currently need to pause all your ads, pay off the remaining balance, and then remove the old credit card from the Account. We hope to create a system where billing multiple cards is possible in the near future.

WTF? Let’s recap: I can save more than one card in my account, but Facebook tells me they can’t bill to more than one. Then, I enter correct, new credit card information at the point of purchase, and they decide to charge a completely different card — one used for previous orders. Even though they gave me a choice during ad setup, and there’s no verbiage to indicate otherwise.

Lesson learned: Don’t try to manage multiple campaigns for multiple customers across multiple payment methods on any platform. Charge it all to your company card, then invoice the client. This is probably common sense to most businesses, but hey — I’m in Year One, making mistakes and getting smarter because of them.

Still, the situation is unacceptable. Facebook: You just gotta charge the right card, and you can’t roll out system-wide changes without addressing user interface.

UPDATE, December 14, 2007: Facebook has removed the charges from the wrong card and applied them to the correct card. Excellent.