I embarrassed myself at a conference by asking an irrelevant question. Does this happen regularly? I am a newcomer to conferences and have tried going to a few to get ready for graduate school. I attended an industry conference (the industry is known for its proportion of graduate-educated workers, and collaboration with academia) sponsored by a company I've been doing contract work for. As they paid for my registration, my badge had their name. 

Long story short, there was a panel session about priorities in manufacturing in this industry. Since I heard about a material that has attracted interest in R&amp;D of this specific community, I asked the panel what their thoughts were about this material. At the time, I felt it was a relevant question since the panelists were industry executives who I thought came across mention of the material. However, only the moderator answered my question, and the panelists just gave me a highly judgmental, silent glare. I felt really bad about it since. Doesn't help I said my affiliation, and the room contained nearly all of the conference attendees.

I looked online and saw people disapprove of questions that make it seem like the person asking is smart. I wasn't trying to do that; I was just wondering if the panelists had any thoughts about that research topic. I realize that discussion of that material was probably a highly academic, trivial topic. 

Does this happen in conferences? Or did I just make me and the company sponsoring my attendance really bad?

Sorry if this doesn't belong here, I can move it if need be.
If the question is "do most conferences have a few bad questions", the answer is certainly yes. People are likely to forget bad questions, more difficult to recover from a bad talk. I've been in quite a few conferences where someone (often a student without adequate guidance) would give a bad talk and everyone would be talking about it for days. I've also been to conferences where most of the talks were thoroughly forgettable and you would have to light the podium on fire to attract negative attention. I don't ever remember hearing people complain so vehemently about a bad question, only a bad talk. 

The main "bad question" is one that is too basic for the audience ("what do you mean by calculus"?) or reveal a basic lack of understanding ("could you address heat dissipation by using logarithms?"). Questions that are too technical are rarely a problem unless it's way off-topic or takes up too much time.