Save the Cat!: What Are You?

A few weeks ago, I attended #SocialMediaWeek in Chicago and listened to some great speakers. One of them recommended a book by Blake Snyder, Save the Cat: The Last Book On Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need. I was wondering what a room full of social media strategists and community managers needed of a book about screenwriting. Then I started reading it and I was totally engulfed in the first chapter titled “What Is It?”.

In this rather short chapter Snyder talks about the importance of titling your movie, conveying the content of a movie in the movie poster and creating that important elevator pitch for script. He also shared with us why there are so many sequels and I will make you read the book if you want a brilliant answer to that question.

I was thinking about this chapter and it really stuck with me through a day of selling social media services. People asked me after I introduced my company, “so what do you actually do?” Then I thought about it.  I realized that while I thought that the way I introduced my company was a concise and creative way, I was actually confusing potential clients. That is definitely something you don’t want in a sales pitch – a confused prospect. I drove home from the office that night and in the middle of an expressway of Chicago traffic, I completely re-envisioned how I needed to position my company. I came up with a killer elevator pitch that everyone will understand and want. All of this came from a book that I did not understand why I was reading.

What does this mean for social media strategist? We need to find the best, most concise, and most understandable messaging for our clients. Especially on Twitter when we are forced to be creative in only a few words, we need to make sure that our messaging is always clear.