Businessweek on The Escalator Pitch

John Tozzi profiles the Twitpitch:

[from The Escalator Pitch]

Forget the elevator pitch. Forget the press release. Forget the PowerPoint deck. If you were making a “Twitpitch” about your business, it would be over by now.

A what? A Twitpitch forces you to tell your company’s story in 140 characters (about 20 words), the maximum length of a message on Twitter, a microblogging platform that is gaining popularity (BusinessWeek.com, 5/15/08). Social media pioneer Stowe Boyd experimented with the idea and coined the term on his blog last month when, overwhelmed by e-mails, he decided to take appointments at the Web 2.0 Expo only via Twitter.

Boyd’s experiment offers a lesson for small companies that want the attention of potential investors, clients, and press: Get to the point. And it applies in almost any business setting, not just on Twitter. It’s no secret that less is more in the age of information overload, no matter how you’re trying to reach people. That’s why Boyd also calls it the escalator pitch. “It’s something you can say in 10 seconds while he’s going up the escalator and you’re going down the escalator,” he says.

Just a minor quibble: I don’t think of this as an experiment, really. I have migrated onto Twitter (and its successors) forever: flow apps are the future, and the only way to deal with the world around us. We are evolving tools to manage the pace and intensity of the world we are creating.

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