Photo by Kel-Z, Creative Commons

What if you could write your 30-second elevator pitch in under five minutes? And it was actually good?

Buzzuka.com helps you do just that. At first I thought it was a gimmick site. But it really works.

Buzzuka.com is a project by Phoenix brand consultant, Paula Satow. I know Paula, have seen her impressive work, and have yet had the opportunity to collaborate with her. Until now.

Give it a try. You briefly answer these questions, and your story writes itself. Then you take some sandpaper to it with a final edit, and you’re in business:

Step One

• What is the pitch for: a person, place or thing?
• Give your pitch a title
• Upload a photo of your pitch
• Who’s my target audience?
• What’s their problem?
• What’s my solution?
• What’s different about me?
• What’s the benefit I deliver?

Step Two

• What’s the WOW Factor for my audience?
• What’s the WOW Factor for me?

Step Three

• This is where you finalize your pitch and make it perfect
• Create a blurb
• Create SEO through tags and links

As I wrote this post, I worked through the above steps on Buzzuka.com and came away with this 30-second pitch. What do you think?

Once you’ve created your pitch, the site makes it easy to share it with others and start generating your own buzz.

One final thought, and Paula you might have to forgive me on this one because I do like your site, but the mixed metaphors in your logo tell me too many different stories. Here’s the way I read it:

Buzz = conversation

Buzzuka = powerful shoulder cannon

So I’m thinking it’s a play off of blasting your story out to the world to generate buzz. But then I read the tagline, “Bee Yourself,” which plays off of “buzz,” as an entomologist might, also asking the user to focus on their uniqueness. Wow, your logo sure tells a lot of stories.

What do you think? Write your 30-second story and send it to me. We can share them in a later post.

Thespians have been using that term for years. “Get out there on stage and SELL IT!”

The Selling is in the Telling.

I’ve been doing several workshops lately on the power of crafting better stories, and I need your help.

We created a simple one-page work sheet with this premise: Capture the pragmatics of left-brain intellectual thinking and migrate these strategic factoids to the romance of the right brain where your engaging story is created.

Test Drive our Sustainable Storytelling Worksheet

Do you have a story you’re dying to tell? Or is your brand story not resonating as well as you like? Want to give it a try?

1. Download the sustainable storytelling worksheet SustainableStorytellingWrksht
2. Fold down the center of the page on the dotted line folding the right side of the page behind the left side.
3. Now on the left side of the page, write your answers in the margins below each thought.
4. Once completed, it’s recommended to go have a beer, glass of wine, or some other vice, and let your brain simmer for awhile.
5. Return, unfold the page, now write your story in the red lines on the right side of the page. You don’t have to worry about writing “War & Peace” because you don’t have that much room. Please use focused, active and descriptive words to bring your black-and-white thinking into color.

• Describe your “Hero” from your brand statement
• Tell us your “Back story.”
• Your challenges and opportunities create your “Inciting Incident” that has turned your world upside-down, for better or worse. Every great story has one. What’s yours?
• Your communication goals are your “End game.” How do you want your story to end?
• Finger your antagonists. Identify the competition, people, economic and environmental forces, finances, doubters, you name it, that stand in your way.
• Now move into Act II, “The Love Story.” Write about the people/customers that you need to marshal to help you achieve your goals, what they care about, and how you help them achieve their goals.
• Now pen your finale; how your character will arch from Hero to Victor, despite all of the ugly nastiness of market dynamics in between.

Please let me know how this exercise works for you. I believe you can use this worksheet for everything from creating your brand position strategy, to a creative brief for a comprehensive campaign, to messaging for individual ads, to internal communications. What do you think?