I Hate Elevator Pitches.

I hate 10 second elevator pitches. There. I said it. How can I summarize the awesomeness that is me in 20 words? I can’t.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a good exercise to become more self-aware, it’s good to know yourself. But I know the entire context that goes with the summary. And that’s the trouble, others don’t.

I had the word “social media” in my pitch. Some people think that’s the only thing I know or do. Or worse, they already have made up their mind about what that label means and build their own context around my story.

Basically, I have an entire book of summaries. I have tons of elevator pitches.

This is on my mind since Ray Almonte made a very insightful comment on my interview with Josh Nankivel and today’s post by Havi Brooks about not freaking out when you have difficulty finding “your thing”, that is: defining what you’re about.

This might seem opposite to previous posts I wrote about this topic. It’s good to know some essence of you. It’s good for your self-awareness and things are more clear for people that communicate with you. At least, that is what I thought initially. Actually, it’s only half the story.

Let me explain my thoughts using a metaphor!

Think about the bar code on a product as a summary of that product.

The bar code is enough at the cash register to identify the price of a carton of milk, without knowing the cow.

For a piece of text, think about a tag cloud as its bar code. In a tag cloud the size of a word is based upon the frequency of its occurrence in the text. Big words are used a lot. If you want to create tag clouds on the web, you can use a nifty tool called Wordle.

If you put my bio though the tool you get:

If you create a tag cloud of my blog postings, this is the result:

The bar code of my shared posts (the blog posting I read and find interesting) is like this:

My bio is a static description of me, my blog posts are a dynamic snapshot of my thoughts and the shared posts is a snapshot of the things that interest me at this moment. They overlap, but are slightly different. All are summaries of me online.

I am not one product. I am a supermarket.

(If you are ever contemplating about “what you’re about”, play with Wordle; you’ll love it.)

Before people communicate with me online, they’ve passed several of these bar codes. Blog, YouTube, book or comments on other peoples blogs. With every passing of a bar code, some don’t go any further, and some do. Those who do, develop a sense of context around me. When they finally do get in contact, all those small buckets of information will help our communication.

People that only have 10 seconds to spare for me, will not pass all the bar codes. And that’s fine.

But what if you’ll only have a short moment? Try to find a social marker that works for you. If people ask me what I do, I just say I’m a Project Shrink. If they like the humor and know people and projects, we connect and I have more than 10 seconds or even minutes to tell a story.

If not, that’s fine too.