Sail Your TwitPitch In

Leslie Poston,

on May 27, 2008,

I don’t usually write about plug ins to platforms on Profy, but I couldn’t resist writing about the latest from Technosailor (Aaron Brazell). It takes a concept I fell in love with last month, the TwitPitch, and makes it integrate easily into your existing blog.

Stowe Boyd was the first to toss out the idea for (and name) the TwitPitch as a means of scheduling his time wisely during the Web 2.0 Expo last month. (One of the companies that TwitPitched Stowe was Profy for our platform launch, which he later cited as a successful pitch .) I loved the idea of using Twitter as an elevator pitch mechanism to promote a more personal and succinct micro pitch, as did several other people in tech, including Sarah Perez.

Aaron Brazell of Technosailor has taken the concept and run with it, creating a plug in for WordPress users that lets you integrate these TwitPitches into your existing blog. This makes it simple for anyone who stops by your site to send you their micro pitch.

To use the plugin, you first create a secondary Twitter account. This is because the plugin will be sending DMs (direct messages) to your original Twitter account, and you are not allowed to send a DM to yourself on Twitter.

Once your secondary Twitter account is created, you install the plugin and place it wherever in your theme you would like it to appear. Aaron notes that the secondary Twitter account and the new Twitter account must follow each other in order to work properly (similar to the way teams are tracked in the popular Color Wars 2008 Twitter game started by Ze Frank last month).

The person reading your blog does not have to have a Twitter account. This is a key selling point for me, as Twitter is often hard to explain to people who aren’t following social media closely, or who don’t have someone in their life who does. To send their TwitPitch they simply fill in the form on the blog page, and Aaron’s plug in does the rest, sending your main account a DM containing the pitch.

I am all for this integration between Twitter and the real world, and for bringing people with great ideas together with the people who want to help them. I think the time of the micro pitch in business has come, and projects like these will fuel it. That being said, I’d be interested to know if Aaron took into account Twitter’s recent “uptime issues” and built in a back up plan for Twitterfailures like the one that happened this weekend.

(edited 5/28/08 to fix a broken link)

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9 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Svetlana Gladkova - May 28, 2008 at 07:14 am PDT

I actually see a serious problem with this plugin as it actually does not follow the original Stowe’s idea. The thing is that one of his major arguments is that he wants to take PR pitches from the email inbox and put it into the open domain for everyone to be able to see it - so that the companies will have to be more transparent in their marketing efforts. With DMs as the main instrument of communicating the message I don’t see how this could be open.

Besides, I think to get such pitches would have been much simpler by simply putting a contact form on the blog (which many bloggers already have) intended for pitches only (and probably limit the messages to 140 characters as well) - without all the hassle involved in creating an extra Twitter account and linking the two accounts to follow each other.
Leslie Poston - May 28, 2008 at 07:22 am PDT

I agree that the contact form on the blog would be somewhat simpler, and that Stowe’s original idea was to get people to pitch their product publicly. I like this as way to bridge the communication gap for people who may be in the social media sphere but not spend as much time on conversation as some of us do.
Aaron Brazell - May 28, 2008 at 09:06 am PDT

@Svetlana actually the pitch is sent via DM, not in the open.

Leslie, thanks for the write-up.
Svetlana Gladkova - May 28, 2008 at 09:59 am PDT

@Aaron: Thanks for stopping by - first. And second is that Stowe’s original idea was to actually make it possible to do pitching in the open. And with DMs they are not open at all so what’s the difference between it and a regular email?

@Leslie: I’m afraid that if a person is not a Twitter user and has no experience with social media, he may be too terrified by the term “twitpitch” to actually understand what he is supposed to do with that form
Aaron Brazell - May 28, 2008 at 10:15 am PDT

Yep, I understand that. The plugin was not intended specifically to model Stowe’s approach. It was modeled along the lines of ways *I* would want to be pitched. I might think about how to do public tweets but the tweet would come from the secondary twitter account which might end up being self-defeating. Open to ideas.
Grendel - May 28, 2008 at 11:58 am PDT

I think Twitpitching is illegal across most of the Bible Belt in the US… I could be thinking of something else, though…
Leslie Poston - May 28, 2008 at 07:31 pm PDT

“I think Twitpitching is illegal across most of the Bible Belt in the US… I could be thinking of something else, though… ”

ROFL
Svetlana Gladkova - May 28, 2008 at 09:24 pm PDT

@Aaron: Now that makes it clear: you wanted to implement it according to your own approach and while it does seem to be pretty far from what Stowe had in mind, I think you had every right to do so - after all, it is up to a blogger to decide how he or she actually wants to be pitched. It’s just that from the description it seemed to be a little too complicated to me personally
Leslie Poston - May 28, 2008 at 09:54 pm PDT

@aaron: thanks for stopping by and giving us your thought process behind creating the plug in - it's always nice to get a peek behind the curtain.