Can you tell your personal brand story in 140 characters or less? That’s the challenge of the escalator pitch, profiled in a recent article in BusinessWeek. The idea is that you have to be able to present your brand value in a “Twitpitch” using Twitter – 140 characters, 20 words.
According to the article, the idea was started by Stowe Boyd, a blogger who tracks technology and social tools, who is now experimenting with micro PR, and only accepts PR pitches via Twitter. The lesson is obvious – get to the point. The same is true of job seekers and those who are pitching their personal brand to a recruiter or potential employer.
In the age of electronic communications and shortening attention spans we should have seen this trend coming. Professionals are being challenged to cram more information into less space. (I often find it challenging to express a well-developed thought in this blog format; some of my peers complain my blog posts are too long.)
Think you can’t sum up the wonderfulness that is you in 20 words or less? Consider the dynamic duo who started Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They successfully approached investors with an eight-word pitch, “access to the world's information in one click.”
If you can condense your market value into a micro pitch, you can get someone’s attention and land that interview. As Boyd says, “The real value isn't how many commas you put into an e-mail. It's really about how effective you are about getting people who are interested to take a call or a meeting."
So how’s your escalator pitch? Can you land an interview in 20 words or less?
