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Informant #399, 9 February 2005: Making the Pitch
http://strom.com/awards/399.html
One
of the things that I like about being a tech journalist is that I get to work
with some very smart people, both as colleagues and as interview subjects. When
I was at VAR Business, Rich Cirillo put together a
cover story called "The Perfect Pitch" comparing the elevator pitches
of 17 hi-tech CEOs and their companies. Our team interviewed the movers and
shakers in our industry and came up with a very interesting story, which you
can read here:
Anyway,
not to leave well enough alone, in the past couple of months freelance
journalist Meryl K. Evans took this idea a step
further and set up a survey to see how many of these pitches are recognizable
to her readers. Go take the quiz now and see how well you'll do at matching the
pitch with the company:
Ê
She
has somewhat skewed her results by segregating the various pitches into
different degrees of recognition. What was somewhat embarrassing and also
proves Evans' point was even though I was one of the original authors of the
piece, I had a hard time recognizing some of the pitches. Granted, we wrote
this story several years ago, but it was tough going for me. The exercise got
me thinking that a good pitch should transcend time and be memorable enough,
especially for the reporter who spent all this time trying to track down the
CEO who is constantly using it.
http://www.internetviz-newsletters.com/internetviz/index000069527.cfm
Well,
I must say that I was surprised by Evans' survey results. Ebay's
pitch (to help practically anyone buy and sell
practically anything)
and Dell's (to be the leading direct computer-systems company, bar none)
were both mostly recognizable, picked by more than 80% of her readers. On
the other hand, Cisco's, Oracle's and Intel's were so vague that less than ten
percent of the people could figure them out. Indeed, no one picked Cisco's
pitch: Continued investments in IT result in measurable productivity gains.
What does that say that makes it unique to Cisco? You got me. Where is the
mention of building network infrastructure, or enabling great Internet
applications, or even being the dot in the dot com? Oops, someone else got that
one already.
Evans
says in her analysis: "I never would have considered these three for the
bottom of the pile. But when you put their names with the pitch, it's
understandable. Those pitches don't match the keywords that would come to mind
when thinking of these companies." I completely agree.
What
was equally surprising was how someone else's pitch was picked, and how
consistently. Novell's pitch was more often chosen as Cisco's, and Intel's
pitch was confused with AMD. This is quite telling, and one of the reasons that
both Novell and Intel have the kind of competition that they do. They just
can't get on message with their customers, suppliers, and partners.
I
guess the next analysis would take a look at the stock prices of these 17
companies in the two or so years since we wrote the article, and see who has
outperformed the Dow or some other measure. Or who has grown market share in
the two years. I have no doubt that Dell and eBay will still be on top, and
Cisco and Oracle near the bottom. All this shows is that finding the perfect
pitch really matters. The more you can communicate your unique value
proposition, the better you'll be at getting and keeping customers.
A
note on browser security
This
week security experts discovered several exploits to Mozilla
and other open-source browsers.
http://secunia.com/advisories/
One
that is most insidious has to do with the way that non-Roman alphabet language
domain names get displayed by the browser. Ironically, because Microsoft never
supported these international domain names IE wasn't vulnerable. If you do use Firefox, go through the following steps to make yourself
secure from at least one of these vulnerabilities:
1.
Type about:config in the URL field;
2. Look for network.enableIDN in the list of
configuration settingsÊ (they're
alphabetical, you'll need to scroll a bit);
3. Double-click on the line that contains network.enableIDN.
The
line should turn bold, and the setting should be "false" (bold means
that it has been changed from the default setting). You are now protected from
the IDN exploit. You also won't be able to properly view IDN sites.
The
bad guys are getting badder. It used to be easier to
spot phished URLs. With this IDN exploit, even
something that looks like the right URL isn't.Ê
Ê
David Strom
Editor-in-Chief
Tom's Guides Publishing
+1 (818) 991-0282 x204
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