Brevity is the Soul of Business
Bill Joos' communications session last night at the Edinburgh University Business School was world class in teaching us how to get heard.
Bill is a VC and marketeer from Silicon Valley who gets 95,000 applications for funding. He and his team at Garage Technology Ventures whittle that down to 50 funded projects.
They have a high regard for education and ideas and a low tolerance of waffle.
He taught us how to nail the core business proposition in just 7 words. Once we'd done that we were allowed to add in a few more to smooth the sentence out, but the core is 7 words.
The father and mother of the 7 word pitch is the 27/7 speech contest - part of the annual Ig-Nobel Research awards for improbable research - research that makes people laugh then think.
In the 24/7 Lectures, several of the world's top thinkers explain his or her subject twice:
FIRST: a complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS. It's fair to say the results wouldn't be riveting at a dinner party.
AND THEN: a clear summary that anyone can understand, in SEVEN (7) WORDS.
I particularly liked "greedy people competing make money" for economics.
Here's the video:
19th 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony: Part 3 of 4 from Annals of Improbable Research on Vimeo.
PHPR's 7-word pitch is:
Publicity to attract customers to B2B businesses.
A close contender was: PR to get B2B businesses noticed.
The smoother version reads:
Online and off-line PR to attract customers and opportunities to B2B businesses.
There was a whole set of propositions as we added emotional force and cured the pain, but the core business proposition takes just 7 words.
PR blog posted by Penny Haywood Calder at PHPR Ltd, Edinburgh, UKTweet
Bill is a VC and marketeer from Silicon Valley who gets 95,000 applications for funding. He and his team at Garage Technology Ventures whittle that down to 50 funded projects.
They have a high regard for education and ideas and a low tolerance of waffle.
He taught us how to nail the core business proposition in just 7 words. Once we'd done that we were allowed to add in a few more to smooth the sentence out, but the core is 7 words.
The father and mother of the 7 word pitch is the 27/7 speech contest - part of the annual Ig-Nobel Research awards for improbable research - research that makes people laugh then think.
In the 24/7 Lectures, several of the world's top thinkers explain his or her subject twice:
FIRST: a complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS. It's fair to say the results wouldn't be riveting at a dinner party.
AND THEN: a clear summary that anyone can understand, in SEVEN (7) WORDS.
I particularly liked "greedy people competing make money" for economics.
Here's the video:
19th 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony: Part 3 of 4 from Annals of Improbable Research on Vimeo.
PHPR's 7-word pitch is:
Publicity to attract customers to B2B businesses.
A close contender was: PR to get B2B businesses noticed.
The smoother version reads:
Online and off-line PR to attract customers and opportunities to B2B businesses.
There was a whole set of propositions as we added emotional force and cured the pain, but the core business proposition takes just 7 words.
PR blog posted by Penny Haywood Calder at PHPR Ltd, Edinburgh, UKTweet
Labels: Bill Joos, Edinburgh, PHPR pr agency, pitching, PR, technology
2 Comments:
Great stuff! Sounds like a good session.
(Today I'm talking in seven word blocks!)
Was brilliant and really nails USPs!
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