Escherman

Understand that the Elevator Pitch is Dead. You remember the elevator pitch. The notion that you should be able to describe what your company does in the length of time consumed by the average elevator ride. I’m here to tell you, that’s way too long these days. Elevator rides seem interminable.

Instead, I humbly suggest that you develop a 120-character pitch for your business. Today. Not the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, but an even tighter 120 characters to allow for re-tweets, and the inevitable next round of brevity.

I realize that 120 characters sounds like the linguistic equivalent of Gary Coleman, but it’s not as short as it seems.

(in fact, the previous sentence is exactly 119 characters)

Go ahead, try it. Leave your elevator pitch in the comments. Maybe you’ll meet a new friend or customer.

Here’s mine: Social media strategic counsel for mid-sized companies & PR firms. Plus, invigorating social media speeches & training. (119)

and you?

This pretty much sums up why brands like Ad Age are missing an opportunity on Twitter. They ignore any conversation, they NEVER respond to comments or inquiries. And they break the most common rules of etiquette for the community. This isn’t surprising considering they represent both the print media (who clearly doesn’t understand how to exist online) and advertising’s Old Guard (who desperately want to remain relevant but usually can’t wrap their head around it).

A typical post is represented by an example like this one: Brink’s Set to Unveil $120 Million Rebranding Effort: NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — At a time when awareness of its br.. http://tinyurl.com/nt623f

They ignore the 140 character limit completely, clearly copying and pasting from an article. Doing this demonstrates that they don’t care about the way information is exchanged on a specific channel (in this case Twitter). Even worse, it has that old media stench, the “WE will tell YOU what is important and you will read every last word”. Using the full character count with a wasted segment of an introductory line also keeps the piece from being re-tweeted. (see another example of AdAge Social Media Blindness)

In this forum, it would be be best to rewrite the headline or summary of the piece to fit the forum. It would also help with engagement if they would add some posts asking for reader opinion or feedback, or by occasionally responding to a tweet in their direction.

Social site users aren’t there to talk about your brand, even though they may occasionally indulge you. They are there to share experiences. To participate in a conversation that they might not have offline. That’s why you should be there too.

One observation I would make is that many of the main hype merchants today in this sector are Gen Y, but maybe Generation Y are also just better inured against their own hype, as they apparently are with all other forms of advertising, and its the older generation that don’t have the antihype antibodies?

The online world is the best friction reducing agent known to man. Implications are fairly “interesting”:

– The more your industry can go online, the lower the overall margins
– The lower the margins, the more it resolves to players who have massive scale and/or those operating at subsistence costs (did someone say User Generated Content)
– In a global market, those with the least friction lose – anyone with true “free trade” will be hollowed out by those with a few barriers.

This has some implications on ‘Net policy for countries, as it is clear that being a bit more frictitious than your trading partners may help – and it looks like we may have to build the Internet with a bit of friction included, if it is actually going to create rather than continually destroy value. One to watch…..

Also has implications for PR and journalism…..

Comments on this post are quite entertaining…..

While there were some very clear and some subtle differences between all of the agencies, most of them scored well in criteria such as strategy development, audience insight, execution & development, emerging & social media and analytics. However, though most of these agencies have built sophisticated analytics teams, they still have work to do in this area as the average score for that criterion by client references was approximately 5% lower than the scores for other criteria.