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As Thomas Jefferson said, the most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do. Perhaps that sentiment has never been more apt than in the age of Twitter. Brevity is an asset online, but in person it can be far more difficult to maintain. After all, no one is going to cut off your impassioned monologue after 140 characters. How do you snag and hold the attention of someone important who has at least 15 other things on her mind? How can you turn a quick hello into a promising business lead without being abrasive? We spoke with authors who specialize in the topic as well as business-communications professors about how to break down your idea into a digestible bite of information and deliver it like a pro. Mastering Your Elevator Pitch: Script It and Test It If you have an idea you believe strongly in, talking to people about it probably comes naturally. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, it comes almost too naturally, says Chris O’Leary, the author of Elevator Pitch Essentials. That’s because you know the logistics, the minutia, and every single component of your business. Guess what? Most people don’t care at least about what you’re working on hour-by-hour. Potential investors, collaborators, or mentors, might need a mile-wide view before wanting to zoom in. “One of the reasons some people have a hard time with elevator pitches are that some personality types aren’t compatible with it,” O’Leary says. “Entrepreneurs are so into their idea sometimes that because they care so much they assume that everybody else does too.” Whereas the “elevator pitch” as we know it originated as a quick hit a synopsis that can be rambled off in the 30 or 60 seconds an elevator ride used to take these days, it’s more like a well-crafted ad than a condensed thesis. Consider your elevator pitch a personal 30-second TV spot: It should be a simple-to-grasp promotion that’s catchy enough to not let your viewer think about changing the channel or about walking away. Moreover, your pitch should impress your listener enough to induce the possibility of a future meeting. Think of it as a hook that makes the person you’re talking to need to ask “How does that work?” or simply request, “Tell me more.” At the very minimum, an elevator pitch should be used as an opportunity to broaden your network of professional contacts. What an elevator pitch is not, says James S. O’Rourke, a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, is this: “An opportunity to exploit, use, bore, or terrorize someone trapped in an elevator with you.” So, remember to be conscientious, O’Rourke says. “Your first objective during an elevator pitch is to get them to like you,” he says. “Because if they don’t like you, they might just take the stairs next time.” To get there, relying on trial-and-error isn’t wise. O’Leary suggests sitting down with a pen and paper to hash out your elevator-pitch ideas. “You actually have to put a pitch together – literally script it out,” he says. “One of the reasons most people don’t put one together is that they try and the first version is terrible. You have to put it down on paper and start revision.” Test it out aloud, and enlist a colleague, friend, or mentor, to let you know if it’s both comprehensible and engaging. O’Leary suggests that if someone two decades older than you is engaged by it, test it on someone two decades younger. A truly effective pitch can work across attention spans and engagement levels, and will appeal to members of both groups. Master this, and you’ll have plenty of time to specialize it in the future. Of course, a close friend or spouse might not provide an unbiased opinion. So Catherine Smith MacDermott, a business professor at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, suggests you further test your elevator pitch with someone in your field or with an expert Recently, she says a pair of local entrepreneurs asked to meet with her, in order to test a pitch before meeting with potential angel investors. “It was really smart that they thought to come to me first,” Smith MacDermott says. “I think they have a wonderful new product, but was able to offer them a lot of straight critique of how they needed to work on their pitch.” Dig Deeper: How to Make Your Best Pitch Mastering Your Elevator Pitch: Use Your Time Well At first, shoot for a 30-second pitch. You can time yourself, or go for about three sentences of content. If you are pitching potential investors, some experts recommend trying to explain how the world will be different in five years if you succeed in what you’re doing. If you are instead looking to use the pitch to land customers, MacDermott suggests you focus on describing your technical skills, your transferrable skills, and your personal qualities. Let’s say your idea is complex because it involves a new business model or innovative technology. If you can’t get your concept down to a sentence, instead squeeze in a basic explanation of your end product or service and if that’s tough, go for a metaphor. O’Leary suggests a tactic Hollywood producers have made popular. He calls it X meets Y modelthe movie Cloverfield is Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project, for example. The formulation is designed to give a quick impression of a show or idea based on existing, widely-known, complex works. Say you were starting a social-networking site for pet adoption; it may be pitched as Facebook (or Match.com) for cats, dogs, and the humans who’d like to adopt them. The X-meets-Y formulation seems to narrow the definition at hand, but also remains vague enough to excite the imagination. A modification of that tactic is relating your product or idea to a familiar concept, but negating what it doesn’t incorporate. Josh Schwartz, creator of TV show The O.C., has written that it originally was pitched as “The Karate Kid without the karate,” which makes no sense on the surface, but if you in fact eliminate the main aspect of the film, you have a Los Angeles-area high school with a new kid in town who’s under major culture shock. As a bonus: Once your concept is understood, you’ve not only built associations that work, but can open up a well of curiosity. If your idea doesn’t fit any mash-up, just go with a simple simile. “It’s as easy as making toast/sending an Evite/posting a listing on Craigslist.” When writing your pitch, use simple language and avoid buzzwords such as “synergy,” “monetization,” and “uniquely positioned.” Everyone has heard just how “customer-focused” everyone else is before. Remember, this is not just a pitch, it’s a first impression and being authentic and human is as helpful to your cause as getting across your professional message. Once you have a solid 30-second pitch, develop both a long version (at around 2 minutes, for instances where you have time for a more in-depth discussion something that can be expanded upon should you, say, meet a potential investor on a long airplane ride), and a short version (15 seconds or so, for times you have to introduce yourself to more than one individual at once). Next: Memorize your pitches. “The advantage of committing them to memory is that you’re able to read your audience while you’re talking to them,” O’Leary says. “You’ve got to rehearse it, but then make it not look canned.” O’Rourke stresses the importance of a well-rehearsed pitch. “Even the Major League long-ball hitters step into the batting cage before the game,” he says. Dig Deeper: Harnessing the Power of Referrals Mastering Your Elevator Pitch: Get to “Tell Me More.” The first goal of your meeting (however informal) should be to get another one. So you’ll want to have a pitch of an appropriate length prepared for meetings with potential investors, partners, or clients, as well as the ability to tailor it in a few ways for different circumstances and timing. A few basic pointers: Know your target. Who are you talking to? How much do they know about your industry? What do you have in common? What problems might they be facing in their business right now? Can you help them? Stay current. Your pitch will need to change as your business and the technologybehind it evolves. Any formal presentation materials should change with the times, too. You don’t want to rely on a PowerPoint presentation that is out of date. Frame your message. An elevator pitch isn’t much good if first you don’t come across as a credible, likeable individual. To achieve that, remember your business etiquette, O’Rourke says. “The first thing you have to do is introduce or re-introduce yourself. Stick out your hand, and put your face and name back in context for them,” he says. “Only then should you explain how they can help you.” And after you deliver a pitch, try to give a really brief review of your talents, education, or skill set, “just so the contact knows, yeah this guy is qualified, and I wouldn’t be reluctant to introduce this person to someone else,” he says. Dig Deeper: How to Talk to the Press About Your Company Mastering Your Elevator Pitch: Embracing Alternatives No matter how concise, clever, and useful your pitch is, there will be some people who just won’t want to hear it. When you do meet a potential partner, client, or investor in person, remember that if things start to tank, there are other hooks that can renew their interest in you. If the subject of your elevator pitch is about to blow you off, there are two options, which translate roughly to “fight or flight.” If you feel like you made a real impression before being cut off, just make sure you get your business card into the hand of your subject before ducking out. If you barely got a chance to open your mouth, just be confident and straight with who you’re talking to. “If you’re good at pushing on through, if you’re not obnoxious about it, just be very specific and ask for two minutes of their time,” Smith MacDermott says. If they say no: “Ask is there a better time to talk with you?” If a pitch has been cut short, try to get the person to go to your website to learn more. Another tactic: Simply ask a question. Remember, it’s not all about you. You’re trying to give a pitch at the moment, but the ultimate goal is to build a solid business relationship. You’ll never get there if you don’t engage the other person and get them talking about themselves. You should also open yourself up to future networking or re-connecting online, if you can. Plenty of elevator pitching has gone digital, so you should expect to take your pitch to an Internet audience, too. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, for example, handles almost every ounce of his daily business over e-mail . If you can say it in person or over the phone, you can put it in writing be it in an e-mail, or on your website. With the proliferation of social media, you’ll have to also know how to make an online pitch one that can be individualized or blasted to 1,000 Twitter followers. “The newer forms of communications and technologies are just reminding us what the rules of thumb are,” O’Leary says. “Twenty-five words or less is a very old kind of concept. I think people are getting better at it today they are getting more aware of it online.” Dig Deeper: When to Ditch Your Elevator Pitch Mastering Your Elevator Pitch: Additional Resources Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. (Random House, 2007.) One of our favorite books on coming up with a winning message by the Heath brothers, who write a column for our sister magazine, Fast Company. Good in a Room: How to Sell Yourself (and Your Ideas) and Win Over Any Audience by Stephanie Palmer (Broadway Business, March 2008.) Good in a Room is a brand new book that understands successful communication and teaches actual tactics. Stephanie Palmer, a former movie executive, shares her experience listening to thousands of pitches. Much of her direction on how to pitch well is counterintuitive, but it’s dead-on accurate. Elevator Pitch Essentials: How to Get Your Point Across in Two Minutes or Less by Chris O’Leary (The Limb Press, September 2008.) How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less by Milo O. Frank. (Pocket Books, April 1990.) Be Sharp: Tell Me About Yourself in Great Introductions and Professional Bios by Paula Asinof and Mina Brown. (BookSurge Publishing, December 2008.) How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Selling Your [Brilliant] Self in Any Situation by Frances Cole Jones. (Ballantine Books, March 2009.) Elevator pitch – Business – Twitter – University of Notre Dame – St. Edward’s University

No matter how experienced an entrepreneur you are or how solid your business idea is, there will always be factors outside your control. If you pick a strong industry with good growth potential, that can eliminate one major source of anxiety that’s outside your sphere of influence. But picking a winning industry is not as simple as it sounds. The most head-smackingly obvious sign of a strong industry is vibrant and consistent growth in total revenue, but that alone is not enough of an indicator. “What you’re really looking for is an industry that’s growing faster than the general economy,” says George Van Horn, a senior analyst at the market research firm IBISWorld , which provided research instrumental to selecting Inc.’s Best Industries 2010 . He suggests looking for “an industry that’s taking business away from another industry.” Other important factors include how much the industry is regulated, whether it is dominated by a handful of extremely large companies, and the steepness of the financial barrier to entry. You will also want to consider whether there are any geographic opportunities to set up shop where the field is less saturated. No single factor should be considered a deal breaker, though. In fact, you can sometimes turn around a seemingly disadvantageous metric like a high barrier to entry so that it’s in your best interest. If you can finagle the funds to enter the field, “that increases the likelihood that you can operate your business successfully without having lots of new competitors,” Van Horn says. In addition to perusing the market research, you want to hit the pavement to gather anecdotal evidence of an industry’s well being and future from trade associations. When checking out an industry, “meet with people who are already involved in the space and see what they think of [your] concept and whether it has legs,” says Rex Falkenrath, the regional director of the Miller Business Innovation Center, a business incubator based in Sandy, Utah. He adds that he would try to get a sense of “how [your] business concept can be differentiated from what everybody else is doing.” The conventional wisdom in entrepreneurial circles is to get in on the ground floor. But what if the industry you are entering is too young to even have a trade association? Falkenrath recommends scoping out the Internet for clues about the industry’s prospects, but Eric Von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a more specific suggestion. “Many new companies are most effectively founded by people who are users, because they have a direct understanding of what’s up,” Von Hippel says. “Watch the activity in the user community and the early pioneer user companies and how rapid the growth is and then jump in.” He gives the examples of the heart-lung machine and the skateboard , which were invented by frustrated surgeons and bored kids, respectively. However, jumping into an industry early is not for everyone. “The timing as to when to get into an industry is really a function of what someone’s risk tolerance might be,” Van Horn says. “Getting in at the earliest stages of an industry emerging into growth has the best potential reward, but it also has more start-up risks involved.” Some entrepreneurs have gone so far as to seek out mature and declining industries in which to launch their ventures. Falkenrath ran one such business supplying automotive engine parts until 2008. The trouble is, when you’re in a moldering industry, there’s less room for error. “If you get to the market when it’s [in] early growth, you can probably even be stupid about it and make a buck,” says Falkenrath, “but as soon as it matures, you better be better than stupid; otherwise, an opportunity is going to slip away from you very fast.” Another way to measure the health of your industry or the demand for your product is by reaching out to consumers directly. To help businesses get a sense of how successful their products or services might be, Anne Beall queries groups of thousands of consumers to find out: “is this something you’re interested in? How likely are you to actually buy it? What needs does it really fulfill, if any?” The president of Beall Research & Training, a market research firm in Chicago, then subdivides the multitude of responses by gender, income, race, and geographic region, among other factors, to figure out the size and identity of the target market. “If you are a new business and you do not have a lot of money to do market research, you need to talk to every single person you’ve ever met about your idea and whether this is something that they would purchase,” Beall says. Rather than tap the crowd of consumers, some companies keep track of hot trends and industries via a network of in-the-know experts. For example, Trendwatching.com, a London-based consumer trend monitor, has 600 trend watchers in more than 100 countries, with the aim of keeping an eye on opportunities around the world. As Chris Turner, the company’s head of research and analysis, puts it, “If you’re a U.S.-based entrepreneur, you want to keep a constant eye on innovations coming from the rest of the world; while the U.S. remains a formidable market, the sources for ideas and inspiration are truly global now.” Eric Von Hippel – Business – Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Innovation – Entrepreneur

No matter how experienced an entrepreneur you are or how solid your business idea is, there will always be factors outside your control. If you pick a strong industry with good growth potential, that can eliminate one major source of anxiety that’s outside your sphere of influence. But picking a winning industry is not as simple as it sounds. The most head-smackingly obvious sign of a strong industry is vibrant and consistent growth in total revenue, but that alone is not enough of an indicator. “What you’re really looking for is an industry that’s growing faster than the general economy,” says George Van Horn, a senior analyst at the market research firm IBISWorld , which provided research instrumental to selecting Inc.’s Best Industries 2010 . He suggests looking for “an industry that’s taking business away from another industry.” Other important factors include how much the industry is regulated, whether it is dominated by a handful of extremely large companies, and the steepness of the financial barrier to entry. You will also want to consider whether there are any geographic opportunities to set up shop where the field is less saturated. No single factor should be considered a deal breaker, though. In fact, you can sometimes turn around a seemingly disadvantageous metric like a high barrier to entry so that it’s in your best interest. If you can finagle the funds to enter the field, “that increases the likelihood that you can operate your business successfully without having lots of new competitors,” Van Horn says. In addition to perusing the market research, you want to hit the pavement to gather anecdotal evidence of an industry’s well being and future from trade associations. When checking out an industry, “meet with people who are already involved in the space and see what they think of [your] concept and whether it has legs,” says Rex Falkenrath, the regional director of the Miller Business Innovation Center, a business incubator based in Sandy, Utah. He adds that he would try to get a sense of “how [your] business concept can be differentiated from what everybody else is doing.” The conventional wisdom in entrepreneurial circles is to get in on the ground floor. But what if the industry you are entering is too young to even have a trade association? Falkenrath recommends scoping out the Internet for clues about the industry’s prospects, but Eric Von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a more specific suggestion. “Many new companies are most effectively founded by people who are users, because they have a direct understanding of what’s up,” Von Hippel says. “Watch the activity in the user community and the early pioneer user companies and how rapid the growth is and then jump in.” He gives the examples of the heart-lung machine and the skateboard , which were invented by frustrated surgeons and bored kids, respectively. However, jumping into an industry early is not for everyone. “The timing as to when to get into an industry is really a function of what someone’s risk tolerance might be,” Van Horn says. “Getting in at the earliest stages of an industry emerging into growth has the best potential reward, but it also has more start-up risks involved.” Some entrepreneurs have gone so far as to seek out mature and declining industries in which to launch their ventures. Falkenrath ran one such business supplying automotive engine parts until 2008. The trouble is, when you’re in a moldering industry, there’s less room for error. “If you get to the market when it’s [in] early growth, you can probably even be stupid about it and make a buck,” says Falkenrath, “but as soon as it matures, you better be better than stupid; otherwise, an opportunity is going to slip away from you very fast.” Another way to measure the health of your industry or the demand for your product is by reaching out to consumers directly. To help businesses get a sense of how successful their products or services might be, Anne Beall queries groups of thousands of consumers to find out: “is this something you’re interested in? How likely are you to actually buy it? What needs does it really fulfill, if any?” The president of Beall Research & Training, a market research firm in Chicago, then subdivides the multitude of responses by gender, income, race, and geographic region, among other factors, to figure out the size and identity of the target market. “If you are a new business and you do not have a lot of money to do market research, you need to talk to every single person you’ve ever met about your idea and whether this is something that they would purchase,” Beall says. Rather than tap the crowd of consumers, some companies keep track of hot trends and industries via a network of in-the-know experts. For example, Trendwatching.com, a London-based consumer trend monitor, has 600 trend watchers in more than 100 countries, with the aim of keeping an eye on opportunities around the world. As Chris Turner, the company’s head of research and analysis, puts it, “If you’re a U.S.-based entrepreneur, you want to keep a constant eye on innovations coming from the rest of the world; while the U.S. remains a formidable market, the sources for ideas and inspiration are truly global now.” Eric Von Hippel – Business – Massachusetts Institute of Technology – Innovation – Entrepreneur

Hadoop is gaining more commercial acceptance. We see a number of signs of its growing popularity. It became abundantly clear in a recent conversation we had with a Yahoo! executive who says the company is rebuilding its future on the distributed warehousing and analytics technology. It’s a similar track we are seeing with the larger consumer social networks and cloud computing providers. Facebook uses Hadoop to do deep social analytics which powers the ability to provide its established level of personal interaction. Windows Azure is adopting Hadoop. Sponsor In a recent call, Eric Baldeschwieler, vice president of Hadoop for Yahoo! said Hadoop is at the core of rebuilding Yahoo! for its future. We followed up in email to ask him about what Hadoop brings to Yahoo’s future. Here’s his prepared statement: “Yahoo’s vision is to be the center of people’s online lives, by delivering personally relevant Internet experiences. Think of Hadoop as a foundational layer beneath two of Yahoo!’s most precious assets: its user data and its diverse collection of content. For Yahoo!, data processing and analysis is the key to understanding its massive global audience, enriching products and connecting users with advertisers. As Hadoop is increasingly becoming the data warehouse for Yahoo!, the company expects to accelerate the pace of innovation across all of its consumer and advertiser experiences.” Yahoo! started using Hadoop initially in 2006 as a science project to process and analyze massive data sets. They developed a prototype on 20 nodes. Today, Yahoo! manages more than 25,000 nodes for data processing and analytics. Yahoo! found that product development could be done in a fraction of the time. They found they could just throw machines at a project to do the processing. What once took 29 days could be accomplished in less than one. As a result, Yahoo! began integrating Hadoop for all parts of its business. The company offloaded storage from the IT department and put the data in a cluster. Today, Yahoo uses Hadoop for determining best advertising placement and for content optimization. For example, the company started testing how the optimization worked on the home page by serving up content relevant to the user. It worked. Yahoo! saw a 150 percent increase in user engagement measurements. The next step is to use Hadoop for optimizing latency, a major issue for scaling data networks in the cloud. Hadop is becoming the standard for data processing and analytics in social networks, genome projects and beyond. Some see that as proof it has gained commercial acceptance. So now it’s on to the next big data dicing project. And what will that be? Cassandra for one. More to come. Discuss

When we talk about mobile apps today, chances are that we are mostly talking about apps for cell phones and – maybe – tablets. The latest trend in mobile apps, however, is apps for cars. One of the companies leading this trend in the U.S. is Ford, which just unveiled a number of apps that students at the University of Michigan created on top of Ford’s platform. Sponsor Making Mobile Apps Work at 70 mpg Earlier today, we got a chance to talk to K. Venkatesh Prasad, the group and technical leader of Ford’s Infotronics Research and Advanced Engineering team. Ford unveiled its SYNC AppLink technology for controlling Android and Blackberry mobile apps through Ford’s voice-driven SYNC interface last month, but as Prasad told us, the company is obviously also looking at mobile apps that are developed specifically for the car. Cloud Computing in the Commute As Prasad stressed when we talked to him, developers have gotten very good at developing apps that work well at 0 mph, but interfaces that also work well at 70 mph are still in their infancy. Apps that run in cars obviously have to overcome a number of issues – especially with regards to safety – that aren’t normally an issue for developers of mobile apps. In order to tap into the creativity of students who grew up with mobile apps and social networks, Ford, together with Microsoft and Intel, teamed up with the University of Michigan and the university’s professors and Ford’s engineers taught a 12-week course entitled “Cloud Computing in the Commute.” The students developed their apps using a Ford Fiesta with a built-in touch screen running. The software platform for these projects was Windows 7 and Microsoft’s Robotics Developer Studio. On the cloud side, the students used Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. Over the course of the semester, these students created six different projects, ranging from a gesture-driven Waze -like app that allows drivers to alert others of traffic jams , accidents and police cars along the road, to a ride-sharing app that taps into Facebook and an app that automatically uploads your fuel economy data to a cloud server. Some of these apps use Ford’s SYNC for voice recognition, while others use gestures that drivers can draw on the car’s built-in screen. Caravan Track From these six app, Ford, Microsoft and Intel chose Caravan Track as the best app. Caravan Track allows clusters of vehicles traveling together to track each other during the drive – which sounds like a great application for anybody who has ever been on a road trip with more than one car. The app uses vehicle telemetry to track each vehicle, maps routes and sends alerts about stops and road conditions. The winning students will take a car that runs Caravan Track on a two-week road trip from Michigan to the Maker Fair in San Mateo on May 22. Cars: The Next Big Market for Mobile Apps? Even more so than just these apps, it’s exciting to see how cars are finally becoming a part of the mobile app ecosystem. While there are still many user interface issues to deal with, systems like Ford’s SYNC could potentially give developers the same kind of resources and computing power as a modern desktop machine. Today, most car buyers assume that their experience with the car won’t change much over the next few years of ownership. Once we get to the point where a lot of cars can run mobile apps however, we might see regular software updates that could greatly change the user experience at intervals that are currently unheard of in the automobile industry where upgrade cycles are usually measured in years. Discuss