Perfect Elevator Pitch for Blogging

Well, there is no such thing as perfect of course. But from the seventeen entries in the Perfect Elevator Pitch for Weblogs Contest the winner has now been selected and it's...............Lee Lefever (why don't you stick up a hand so people know who you are)

Ok, thanks, Lee. And congratulations! The runners up were:

Second Place - Randal Moss Third Place (tied) - Michael Angeles and Jack Vinson

On the judging panel were a whole range of interesting bloggers and myself:

Dave Pollard,

DinaMehta,

Don Park,

Funch,

Jim McGee,

Lilia Efimova,

Dugage,

Phil Wolff,

Ross Mayfield,

Scott Allen

Judging was an interesting experience, and it would be fun to carry on some conversation about what we learned at the SocialText workspace we used as our judging room.

One thing which to me was interesting to see is that a lot of the pitches took up one characteristic of blogging, such as context with Lee, but also storytelling, filtering conversations, etc. whereas noone would cover them all. To me it seems a lot as if the format is too much taylored to the old industrial way of talking about things. Explain to me neat row of causally related steps that show me return in numbers, by the end of next month, or this quarter at the latest.

No wonder Lee had such a time-consuming experience crafting his pitch. Is this a case of wrong vocabulary of sorts? Not that results don't matter, mind you, but causality is, especially in knowledge intensive environments, not so predictable beforehand as our business models tend to assume. With hindsight, yes, but not up front. You know, complexity and stuff. And I didn't believe most of the ROI stories I heard about a lot of more traditional investments to be as straightforward and simple as presented. So when we are moving into intangibles and more socially oriented tools I think it will get near impossible to do this, and the format of elevator pitches will seize to be useful.

The text of the winning pitch is:

First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context -- the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.

Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company -- context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events."