A Tweetable Definition

Relax, this is not a blog post commanding or even imploring you to take up tweeting.

I am though very much an advocate of the brevity it requires permeating through the sales arena. Not quite with all of the text speak and grammatical liberties mind you.

A while ago I came across an entertaining web post with a purpose of putting a “stake in the ground” for their personal (and I gather, respected) definition of Social CRM.

After intro remarks describing why the author was so inclined, 18 bullets followed. Running to just over 1,200 words it certainly was a comprehensive definition. Although not the precise topic of this post, demonstrating the desire for a shorter working sCRM definition, these 54 words were posted in summary:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

I noted that it took up 378 characters. The author then decided a “tweetable definition” was necessary. At 71 characters, this was well within twitterverse constraints:

“The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”

I heartily condone this approach to framing an issue. I immediately thought how useful this kind of journey would be applied to a presentation too. Especially a sales pitch where you want to get across a new idea (or new product).

It got me thinking if any other wide-ranging topics had been similarly boiled down to their tweet-sized limit. I instantly found a lovely example, courtesy of a book setting a competition to find a tweetable definition for that most complex of concepts, philosophy.

You get their favourite ten attempts, including (possibly from a chap called Karl, tweeting as @twitkarl7777),

Philosophy is a way to make complex things simple. And simple things complex.

My initial google also showed that there’s a growing trend for people to give their recommendations and general gems of advice in tweet form too. Think ‘no bullet point over 140 characters’. And thankfully written in simple English, not something like ‘! No bullet >140chars’.

Many a slide or proposal could benefit from this kind of (graphical and linguistic) treatment, don’t you think …?