Your elevator pitch is another vital component in your personal branding, verbal collateral that demands that you (yet again) find a way to boil down what you do into a short, pithy quote that grabs attention.
Harder still to craft a pitch that isn’t the verbal version of a shill who grabs people by the lapels and drones on in unwanted sales speak.
Below is my… well, it’s more an introduction than an elevator pitch. Written specifically for the Mediaville Mixer event, it has a future as my blogging pitch. I then went ahead and said something else because what I had written didn’t seem to fit the mood. Besides, I could give out slices of apple instead.
Emergency personal branding, um, solution.
The pitch feels a little dry to be honest. Or… I don’t know what. At 117 words, I fret that it blows its word budget, leaving the last line (the call to action) airing on borrowed time.
There’s always the ‘I help people to….’ approach. But that clangs of boilerplate to me. No matter how I hammer it out, it always has the dull finish of a hackneyed business term [I’m looking at you ‘solutioning’, ‘ideation’ and err… ‘boilerplate’].
Besides, I’m a writer dammit – I should be able to draft a unique 30-second spiel about myself, shouldn’t I?
I’m Dan Kirk; my background is in journalism and commercial copywriting. I’m also Mediaville’s resident blogger.
If you’ve read the blog, you’ll know that we’re looking at different ways to bring freelancers beneficial partnerships, two of the main ideas being coworking and cross industry collaboration.
This involves meeting with as many freelancers, employers and media association reps as I can, and engage in open conversation about the freelancer’s craft itself, ways that we can all do better business, and to investigate the kinds of opportunities that exist beyond the familiar streams.
So, if that sounds like a conversation you’d like to be part of, then I’d love to meet you and we can include all that cool stuff that you do!
There.
Maybe I’m just being precious about it because I wrote sales copy for a long time. Are my words are too shaped by that? Is length an issue here? Does it communicate and engage effectively?
Not having tested it, I just want to know if it works.
Do you have a pitch? What’s yours? I’d love to hear how it. How do you grab the attention (and not the lapels)? How you keep yours short, pithy? Do you boilerplate or not?
