The Elevator Pitch Is Dead. Introducing The Twitpitch

By Stowe Boyd

I am shifting permanently to twitpitching as the sole medium for companies to pitch me. I debuted the idea in the past few weeks, leading up to Web 2.0 Expo (see Web 2.0 Expo Meeting Scheduling: Twitpitch Me! and As Bad As It Gets: The Case For Twitpitches, Part II ). Basically, I want companies to get their story down to a one-liner ‘escalator’ pitch — like 10 seconds long — which is going to force them to drop the superlatives and buzzwords and get to the heart of the matter.

A twitpitch takes the following form:

1. A twitter message of the form “@stoweboyd [pitch goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. (Note the #hashtag means that these will be accessible at www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.)
2. A second, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [single URL goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch”. Just one URL, please.
3. A third, optional twitter of the form “@stoweboyd [proposed time(s) to meet or call go here without the brackets] #twitpitch”.

That’s it.

Twitpitches that work — that interest me enough to warrant spending some time to find out more — will be retwittered on my @stoweboyd account, and here on my blog.

And companies will be directed to this page to get the idea, and those that try to stick with the bulging email approach will suffer a three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule: After three times of being warned, they go into the spam category. Obviously I am open to receiving emails for general communication, just not for pitches.

I have both @twitpitch and @twitcatch accounts at Twitter, but I am reserving them for a future, more complex and automated solution, downstream.