Elevator speech of the web

As you might know elevator speech or pitch is short marketing speech of your product or service. I just realized that there is often elevator speech for web content also. It's is this part, the first 3-4 sentences where you either get the reader or lose it.

Sure elevator speech has much other meanings in business world than just attract the person to continue with the subject, but I think the basic idea is the same. You try to in short time period convince the other to either stick with it or not.

In the web this stand most when you are using RSS, Twitter or some of news services. I notice that I usually give every article about 10 to 15 seconds. So normally bit over the first chapter. If it doesn't seem interesting I usually jump to next one. So if you were me, now I would be either sold or lost already.

Twitter is a perfect example of how to attract users fast. I think that part of Twitters popularity bases on that it makes people to really shortly introduce what their content (or the content they share) is all about. It makes people to shorten the key message of the link they are sharing to bit over 100 characters. Some are much better than the others in twitter. It would be nice to see if actually some people get more hits for their shared links than others for the same content with different introduction. I bet they do, but I haven't seen any data on that one.

I think this is relevant for this type of services. You only have small amount of time to get someone to read your content. In blogging and many news services, pictures, videos and overall UX of the site also help. These give some more time to attract person to check what the content is all about.

Maybe there's something to learn for all bloggers in elevator speeches.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen