Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When you’re listening to a good speech, your mind is engaged. The speech ends and the audience claps. Now raise your hand and ask the first question. I first learned this on December 7, 1995. The buzz around Web browsers had become deafening.

I was a brand new analyst and Forrester sent me to Seattle to hear Microsoft’s announcement about what it was doing about the Internet.

About a thousand of us — reporters, analysts, and lots of hangers-on — piled into this huge auditorium in downtown Seattle. I knew nobody. I sat in the second row with a laptop to take notes. The stage was about 7 feet above the audience; I needed to crane my neck to watch as Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold explain how they’d become “hard core” about the Internet. There were a slew of announcements about MSN, the new Internet Explorer browser, and partnerships. After about three hours of presentations, they asked for questions.

I raised my hand and Bill Gates called on me. I identified myself and asked why there were no content providers mentioned in any of the pronouncements.

He stared down at me from on high and I could clearly feel him thinking “Who the heck is this pipsqueak?” He certainly knew Forrester, but he didn’t know me. He mumbled his way through some answer that didn’t answer the question and the Q&A continued....