This is one of the biggest challenges for today’s marketer. We are competing in quantity and speed. The amount of information available at any given moment is unmanageable, and seconds later, gets replaced with a fresh set. 140-character “journalism” is perfectly suited for this new dynamic, but it lacks depth.
Someone said the Elevator Pitch was dead. I would challenge that, everything is an Elevator Pitch, a Sound Bite. And if it’s not, the majority of our audience will not get past the first sentence or two. The Headline becomes the news, the song becomes the chorus, and the rest is for the truly concerned, the curious.
Our job as communicators becomes ever more important. To be able to boil down a concept in this limited space, and to get it past all the noise, before it vanishes, requires superpowers. But even more so, the few people who are going to read past that point, will tear each sentence apart and probably fact-check it.